Mounting Amazon S3 Cloud Storage in Windows:

Open Windows PowerShell as Administrator.

Create the directory to download and store rclone files:

mkdir c:\rclone

Go to the created directory:

cd c:\rclone

Download rclone by using the direct link mentioned above:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri “https://downloads.rclone.org/v1.51.0/rclone-v1.51.0-windows-amd64.zip” -OutFile “c:\rclone\rclone.zip”

Extract files from the downloaded archive:

Expand-Archive -path ‘c:\rclone\rclone.zip’ -destinationpath ‘.\’

Check the contents of the directory:

dir

Copy the extracted files to C:\rclone\ to avoid dots in the directory name:

cp C:\rclone\rclone-v1.51.0-windows-amd64\*.* C:\rclone\

Run rclone in the configuring mode:

.\rclone.exe config

The configurator is working as a wizard in the command line mode. Select the needed parameters at each step of the wizard.

Type n and press Enter to select the New remote option.

n/s/q> n

Enter the name of your S3 bucket:

name> bucket-name

Select the type of cloud storage to configure. Type 4 to select Amazon S3 cloud storage.

Storage> 4

Choose your S3 provider. Type 1 to select Amazon Web Services S3.

provider> 1

Get AWS credentials from runtime (true or false). 1 (false) is used by default. Press Enter without typing anything to use the default value.

env_auth> 1

Enter your AWS access key:

access_key_id> xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Enter your secret access key:

secret_access_key> xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Region to connect to Mumbai(ap-south-1) is used for our bucket in this example and we should type14.

region> 14

Endpoint for S3 API. Leave blank if using AWS to use the default endpoint for the region. Press Enter.

Endpoint>

Location constraint must be set to match the Region. Type 14 to select the Mumbai(ap-south-1)).

location_constraint> 14

Canned ACL used when creating buckets and storing or copying objects. Press Enter to use the default parameters.

acl>

Select the storage class to use when storing new objects in S3. Enter a string value. The standard storage class option (2) is suitable in our case.

storage_class> 2

Edit advanced config? (y/n)

y/n> n

Check your configuration and type y (yes) if everything is correct.

t/e/d> y

Type q to quit the configuration wizard.

e/n/d/r/c/s/q> q

Rclone is now configured to work with Amazon S3 cloud storage. Make sure you have the correct date and time settings on your Windows machine. Otherwise an error can occur when mounting an S3 bucket

Run rclone in the directory where rclone.exe is located and list buckets available for your AWS account:

.\rclone.exe lsd bucket-name:

Y

you can enter c:\rclone to the Path environment variable. It allows you to run rclone from any directory without switching to the directory where rclone.exe is stored.

Install Chocolately, which is a Windows package manager that can be used to install applications from online repositories:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; `

  iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(‘https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1’))

WinFSP (Windows File System Proxy) is the Windows analog of the Linux FUSE and it is fast, stable and allows you to create user mode file systems.

Install WinFSP from Chocolatey repositories:

choco install winfsp -y

Now you can mount your Amazon S3 bucket to your Windows system as a network drive. Let’s mount the bucket-name as S:

.\rclone mount bucket-name:bucket-name/ S: –vfs-cache-mode full

Where the first “bucket-name” is the bucket name entered in the first step of the rclone configuration wizard and the second “bucket-name” that is defined after “:” is the Amazon S3 bucket name set in the AWS web interface.

List all connected disks and partitions:

gdr -PSProvider ‘FileSystem’

Check the content of the mapped network drive:

ls S:

The S3 bucket is now mounted as a network drive (S:).

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