The newest version of FileZoomer Adds support for several new Amazon Web Services S3 capabilities, including:

Object Life Cycle: specify that files be deleted or moved to low-cost AWS Glacier storage after a set number of days or after a certain date.

Versioning: Turned on at the bucket level, versioning means that even if you upload multiple updates to a file all previous versions are saved. The newest version shows up as usual, but if you right-click the file and “show versions” all the prior versions will be displayed, and they can then be downloaded.

It’s important to know that with the current version of S3 these two features — Object Life Cycle and Versioning — are mutually exclusive. If you turn on Versioning you can’t also use Life Cycle rules, and if you are using Life Cycle you can’t turn on Versioning.

The new version of FileZoomer also includes a Batch Processing option. After interactively defining a batch process using “File…Batch Configuration”, you can later initiate that process in FileZoomer with “File…Run Batch”. This makes it easy, for instance, to update a folder and its contents with all new and updated files since the last time the batch upload was run.

Using a pure batch processing version of the filezoomer java “jar” file, along with a configuration file you have created interactively, you can also do things like schedule an unattended run of an upload job.

For more details on these new features see the individual posts for Object Life Cycle, Versioning, and Batch Processing..

FileZoomer now supports Amazon S3 Versioning, which keeps track of all versions of files in a bucket, and allows you to display and retrieve older versions of updated files. There are two important things to know about this S3 feature:

• Versioning is set for the whole bucket.
• Once set you can’t turn Versioning back off for that bucket and its files. Versioning can, however, be suspended.
• Versioning is incompatible with the Object Life Cycle feature (automatic deletion or migration to Glacier).

So plan ahead before enabling Versioning for a bucket.

To turn on Versioning navigate to the bucket and use “File…Bucket Versioning”

Check “Enable Versioning” and click OK.

To access earlier versions of a particular file, right-click the file and “Show Versions”

The version list will initially display the current version at the top, along with all previous versions. Right-click to Download or Delete a version of the file.

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FileZoomer beta .6 has been released and it can now generate a report that shows the total amount of storage you’re using in an Amazon S3 account across all of your S3 Buckets.  We’re also providing a high level estimate of the monthly cost of that storage from Amazon.  The estimate uses US standard pricing and is based on standard storage costs so it may not be accurate for your particular location but it should provide a useful estimate.

To generate the report from within FileZoomer just click the menu item for view and then the usage report.

Click the menu item for view, then click "usage report"

The resulting report will look a bit like this, but hopefully you are making better use of your S3 account than we are with this test account.

S3 Storage Report

As you can see this test account has only a few files and folders and contains only 141,692,710 Kb of storage, or less than 140 MBs.

Let us know in the comments if there are any questions on how to use the report, or if you have any suggestions on improving the it..

The user community has spoken and file compression, the feature you’ve requested most has been added to FileZoomer.

The benefits of compressing files are probably obvious but we’ll list them anyway.  Compressing files reduces bandwidth costs, reduces transfer times and reduces storage costs.  Now  FileZoomer is not only considerably faster but using it to manage your S3 accounts will actually save you money on your monthly Amazon S3 bills.

File compression is an account option that can be turned on and off as you wish.  The default setting for file compression is off so you’ll need to turn it on to see it work.  To turn on file compression just launch File Zoomer and log in to your S3 account, then click the “preferences” menu item.   Click “Zip Compressible Files” and once the checkmark is there all compressible files will be compressed during uploads, downloads and while stored.  You’ll see a new .zip extension added to each compressed file so that you can easily identify compressed files.

Downloading files that were compressed during upload with FileZoomer will automatically uncompress them.  If you choose to use another utility to download your files you’ll be able to unzip them using standard zip tools.

One of the things we use S3 for is to store log files, which are highly compressible.  In our testing of daily log file uploads we’re seeing transfer speed improvements of nearly 80% with a corresponding reduction in space used to store the files.

File types that are inherently already compressed, for instance jpeg, mp3, zip, and most video files, will not get compressed as they are not “compressible”.

Please let us know what you think of this feature and what other features you’d like to see added.

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We have a few users with really large file and folder counts within buckets that were not being displayed correctly.  That problem has been fixed.  Because FileZoomer is a Java Webstart app the next time you run it you’ll automatically get the latest version so there is nothing you need to update on your end..