Amazon S3

ExpanDrive has fantastic support for the Amazon S3 API, letting you connect directly to AWS or any number of S3-compatible storage services like DreamObjects, Digital Ocean Spaces or Akamai Linode Object Storage. On S3, your files and folders are stored inside top-level folders called buckets that are uniquely named throughout all of S3.

Connection Parameters

Each S3 or S3-compatible connection in Expandrive provides parameters to control exactly what you're connecting to along with your credentials.

Server

This is the address at which the service can be reached. For Amazon S3, use the default value of https://s3.amazonaws.com. For other S3-compatible providers, use the address for their service.

Access Key

The access key is your unique identifier for authentication. Think of it like a username for your S3 account. It's usually a 20-character alphanumeric string (e.g., AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE)

You can obtain this from your AWS IAM console (for Amazon S3) or from your storage provider's dashboard. Keep this confidential and never share it publicly.

As a best practice, use the access key of a user other than your root account user.

Both the access key and secret key work together as a pair for authentication - if someone gets hold of either one alone, it's not useful, but together they provide full access to your S3 resources.

Secret Key

The secret key is your private authentication key that pairs with your access key. This is like a password.

When you save your connection info in ExpanDrive, the secret key is securely stored within your local keychain.

Custom Region

This identifies the region where your bucket resides, which will vary depending on which provider you are using.

This field is optional because S3 bucket names are globally unique, and they can be identified even if you don't specify the region. However, providing the correct region improves performance and avoids potential issues and extra costs for requests being routed unnecessarily through the default region.

Bucket

This field lets you restrict what buckets the connection can access on your account. Bucket level organization is a hallmark of S3-compatible services; buckets are essentially top-level folders of your S3 account, which you can attach policies to.

If your credentials do not have access to list the buckets in your account, provide the bucket name in your connection parameters.

Nickname

The nickname serves to identify the connection. This name will show up as the volume label on the mounted drive.

Bucket level organization

Amazon S3 is organized into buckets, which are top-level folders that are uniquely named throughout the service. You can attach various policies to a bucket such as restricting access to particular users or making hosted content available to the public.

If you have permission to list buckets in your S3 account, ExpanDrive can mount the root of the account, showing you all your buckets.

You can instead restrict a mount a specific bucket, or even a particular folder in a bucket, by typing the bucket name in the remote path section. This is useful if you only have access to only a particular bucket or don't have the permissions to list the buckets for an account.

Connecting to S3-Compatible Services

Many object storage services use APIs that behave the same as Amazon S3 APIs, and you can use ExpanDrive to connect to them with the S3 connector by changing the connection parameters.

DreamObjects Connection Parameters

Override the Server parameter with the hostname for your account, either objects-us-east-1.dream.io or s3.us-east-005.dream.io.

Supply the access key and secret key in the usual fields. This information is associated with your DreamObjects user.

DigitalOcean Spaces

To use DigitalOcean Spaces, the endpoint will be https://<region>.digitaloceanspaces.com where <region> is the DigitalOcean datacenter region (for example, nyc3) where your bucket is located.

Linode Object Storage

ExpanDrive can connect to Akamai Linode Object Storage. The server address is https://<region>.linodeobjects.com where <region> is the datacenter region. If you only need to connect to a single bucket, you can use that bucket's URL instead for the server address.

Create access keys for connecting to your bucket, and provide those within the access key and secret key fields.

Open Stack Swift Object Storage

To use the S3 connector with your Swift Object Storage, provide the host name of your Open Stack cloud server. You need to generate credentials from your chosen authentication service. to use for the access key and secret key.