Keeping track of who accessed your data and when is crucial for security. S3 Explorer supports viewing server access logs if you have enabled logging at the bucket level. Because enabling and configuring logging often requires IAM permissions, the setup must be done in AWS directly. Once logs are being written to a destination bucket, you can browse them just like any other object.
Open the Logging dashboard from the main navigation bar to see a list of log folders. Each folder corresponds to a bucket you have configured for logging. Drill down to view the plain-text log files. Each line shows the requester IP, time of request and operation performed.
For quick insight into changes, S3 Explorer also displays object version history in the Versioning tab. Select an object and choose Versions to see past states along with timestamps. You can restore a previous version with a single click.
If you notice suspicious activity, use the ACL or Bucket Policy tabs to tighten permissions. Remember that S3 Explorer itself does not integrate with AWS CloudTrail or CloudWatch events, so deep auditing should still be done through AWS tools. However, having access logs and version history in one place can speed up investigations.
The click path for reviewing logs is: Main navigation → Logging → choose log folder → open log file. For version history, use: Sidebar → select bucket → select object → Inspector panel → Versioning tab → Versions.
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