Noel Erskine, Technology Coordinator Norris Schools

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This app rocks for managing your cloud storage right from your computer like a local hard drive.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

In several of my articles, I have mentioned the Gladinet product and how you really need to look at it for managing many of your online free (or purchased) cloud storage services. In this short article, I will let you know a little bit about the product and how you can easily have over 30+ gig of storage on the cloud, all accessible by clicking on a drive letter from within your computer.

Once this product is installed, it maps a drive letter (default is Y drive) to your computer where you can click on the drive, just like it was a local drive on your computer, and get to many of your online services and manage them by just dragging and dropping files.

Online services that you will want to have that are free, and are supported by this product:

  • Microsoft's Sky Drive. (25 Gig Free) See my January 17th 2012 article on this one: http://goo.gl/Q1JyE
  • Amazon's Cloud drive.   (5 Gig Free) (If you have an Amazon account, you already have this and may not even know it.)  https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore
  • Box.net (5 Gig Free)  http://box.com/
  • It will also connect to your Picasa site for pictures (1 Gig Free). (Works for regular Gmail accounts and Google Apps accounts.) 
  • It will connect to your Google Docs. If you have Google Apps for Business or Schools, then it will only connect to that account if you buy the full version and not the free version.


These services are free, and offer their own sync software, etc... but are not supported by Gladinet. I wanted to mention these because they are great services that you will want to have for their service, mobile apps, software, etc...

  • Dropbox (2 Gig free and more for friend recomendations.) https://www.dropbox.com/ 
  • SugarSync (5 Gig free)  https://www.sugarsync.com/

I am using the free version of Gladinet and love it.  If you buy the product, you can connect to your Google Apps account as well as setup folders locally to automatically sync to your cloud services. (Similar to what the DropBox and SugarSync software packages do for you.) You are given all of the pro features for a few days, so you can try them out to see if you want to keep those services.

After the product is installed, you add your cloud storage services and then go to your Y drive and you see them all there! If you need to add more services or delete services you will start the Gladinet Cloud Desktop Console program found on your start menu. The install adds the Gladinet Cloud Desktop program to your start up, so when you reboot your computer it starts automatically.  (If you are in a school that controls your start up and start menu, you may need to start this program each time manually for your Y drive to show up.)


Enjoy, this is a great product and an easy way to manage all of your files on the cloud.

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