What is Amazon S3 and how to use it on a QNAP NAS?

What on earth is Amazon S3 you may ask. Well it is a very clever product from Amazon, S3 stands for Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

That does not really mean much but the official blurb is:

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

It is basically a lot of hard drives stuck together at Amazon HQ designed to allow people to store an almost infinite amount of data for a very cheap price. The best bit is it is secure and you have no danger of the data going missing as its run off the same servers the Amazon website and it’s not likely Amazon is going anywhere Remember this is not “free” Amazon charge a very small amount of money for each bit of data they store so check out the pricing before uploading all those Mp3′s you want to keep safe.

If you follow the information below it will tell you how to enable your QNAP NAS to perform an online secure backup. Remember while a NAS offers great security due to its redundancy there is nothing like an offsite backup, a RAID won’t save your data in a fire or theft!

The supported models for the QNAP Amazon S3 add-on are:

SS-439 Pro, SS-839 Pro, TS-110, TS-119, TS-210, TS-219, TS-219P, TS-239 Pro, TS-239 Pro II, TS-259 Pro, TS-410, TS-410U, TS-419P, TS-419U, TS-439U-SP, TS-439U-RP, TS-439 Pro, TS-439 Pro II, TS-459 Pro, TS-509 Pro, TS-639 Pro, TS-659 Pro, TS-809 Pro, TS-809U-RP, TS-859 Pro  

All these QNAP models are available from us (just give us a call) and can come pre-built with the hard drives you want already fitted.

How to Use Amazon S3 with QNAP Turbo NAS

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an online storage web service provided by Amazon Web Services. QNAP Turbo NAS supports Amazon S3 to allow the users to back up the data from the NAS to Amazon S3, or download it from Amazon S3 to the NAS at anytime. Besides, the users can also create scheduled replication job for daily, weekly, or monthly backup. 

To use the Amazon S3 feature on QNAP NAS, follow the steps below: 

Getting an Amazon S3 Account 

Step 1: Sign up/ Login Amazon Web Services Account
You need to sign up for Amazon S3 account (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/). For the price information, please refer to the Amazon web services website. 

Step 2: Get Your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key
Once you have successfully signed up an account, you will receive your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. Please keep your ID and key safe. 

If you have missed the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key notification, click “Your Account” and choose “Security Credentials” to retrieve them. 

You can check the account activities, view the payment, and change your profile etc. under “Your Account”. Now your Amazon S3 account is created and ready to go. 

Using Amazon S3 on Your PC
Your Amazon S3 account starts with a clean root account. On the root is where you create buckets. A bucket refers to a root folder in Amazon S3. You can create multiple buckets, and upload your folders and images to the buckets. Before creating any remote replication job on QNAP NAS, please create at least one bucket on Amazon S3 by an Amazon S3 application. For the beginners, we recommend the S3Fox Firefox add-on. 

Using Amazon S3 with Firefox S3Fox
Make sure you have installed Firefox browser and S3Fox. 

Step 1: Launch S3 Organizer
Open a Firefox web browser. Go to “Tools” and select “S3 Organizer”. 

Step 2: Set up account
Click “Manage Accounts” and enter your Amazon S3 account information with S3 Organizer. Click “Add” to save the information. 

Step 3: Get connected, create the first bucket
Once you have entered the correct information, you will be brought to your account (which is blank by default). Your local folders are shown on the left and Amazon S3 buckets are shown on the right. On the right side of S3 Organizer, click “Create Directory”. Enter the bucket name, e.g. qnapbackup. Any folders created on root level will be your buckets. Your bucket name must be different from that of other S3 users. All the files and folders will be stored and organized under the buckets. 

Step 4: Create folders and upload files
Double click your bucket and create a folder. You can upload files to the folder. By default, the files uploaded to your Amazon S3 account are not accessible by the public. For more information, please refer to this video tutorial. 

Some Amazon S3-Supported Applications: 

• Firefox browser with S3Fox plug-in.
• JungleDisk.
• Transmit – FTP/SFTP application for Mac.
• Backup Manager – Command-line tool for Linux.
• S3 Backup – Windows desktop application.
• jets3t – Open-source Java toolkit and application suite for Amazon S3.
• Sync2S3
• SME Storage.
• S3Sync.

Amazon S3 Support on QNAP NAS
You can back up the NAS data to or retrieve the data from the Amazon S3. Amazon’s services will generally accept requests that are received within 15 minutes after you login Amazon S3. Before getting started, make sure your system clock is set correctly according to your time zone. It is suggested to configure your NAS to automatically synchronize with the system clock using the Network Time Protocol (NTP). 

Create Remote Replication Job on Amazon S3 

Follow the steps below to create a remote replication job on Amazon S3.
1.Login your QNAP NAS and go to “Backup” > “Remote Replication” > “Amazon S3″. Click “Create New Replicating Job”. 

2.Enter the job name. 

3.Select usage Type (Upload or download) from the dropdown menu. Then input the access key, private key and remote path. A bucket is the root directory on Amazon S3. You can do remote host testing by clicking “TEST”. Other settings are optional. 

4.Specify the local path as Network Share/ Directory. Select the network share from dropdown menu and input the directory. 

5.Specify your replication schedule. 

6.Click “Finish” to complete the setup. 

Upon successful job creation you will see the status of the replication job(s). You can edit or delete them if necessary.