Consumer cloud storage solutions like Google Drive, DropBox, and OneDrive are great for personal use, or maybe even small to midsize businesses (SMBs). But if you’re a large company, enterprise-grade solutions like Amazon S3 are better suited for you.
Amazon S3 provides several features that can help you comply with stricter corporate security policies as well as regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI-DSS. To mention a few benefits, these features will allow you to:
- keep your data confidential by encrypting data at rest,
- specify a region to comply with laws and regulations (for example, GDPR), which contain strict guidelines on where certain types of data should be stored, and
- keep more detailed logs for audit or digital forensics purposes.
In this article, we’ll show you how to quickly set up an Amazon S3 bucket and folder to get you started with S3 storage. Let’s get started.
Create an Amazon S3 bucket
We will assume that you already have an AWS account. So if you already have one, just log into the AWS console.
Expand the All Services drop-down list and click S3 under Storage.
When the next screen appears, click the Create Segment button.
Give the bucket a name, making sure it is DNS compatible. We won’t go into the details of specific naming conventions for DNS compatibility, but if you’re just using a name that is 3-63 alphanumeric characters and all alphabetic characters in lowercase, you should be well.
At this point, you can immediately create your first S3 bucket by clicking the Create button shown in the lower left corner of the screenshot above. This will create a cart with all default settings. The default settings are usually sufficient for a start. However, you might want to change the Region setting first.
You need to select a region close to your geographic location. Otherwise, if the default region is far from your normal geographic location, you may experience latency issues that will slow down your upload and download speeds.
After you click the Create button, you will see that the S3 bucket you created is ready to use.
Now, before you start uploading files to the trash, you can create a folder first and then upload files to that folder instead. Like folders on your operating system’s file system, S3 Recycle Bin folders allow you to separate files.
To create a folder, simply click on the container itself, go to the Browse tab and click the New Folder button.
Give the folder a name and click the Save button.
Here is the folder we created for this tutorial.
Now that you have your S3 bucket folder, you can start uploading files to it. Click a folder to navigate to it.
To upload files to your folder, you can:
Click the Upload button and then drag the files into the Upload dialog box OR click the Add Files button in the Upload dialog box and then select the files you want to upload using the browser tool.
Or you can just drag and drop files to the blank space like this:
Once the file is ready to upload, the Upload dialog box should appear. Just click the “Download” button to confirm.
That’s all. Come back next time for more tips like this. Be sure to check out my other posts on how to quickly migrate data to Amazon S3 and how to migrate data from S3 to Glacier to save money on storage. Enjoy!