Gladinet – Mapping Cloud Storage to your Windows Explorer

Gladinet is very simple and doesn’t need a whole lot of explanation.  It allows you to map a drive on your computer to multiple cloud backup services.

Free Starter Edition

Professional Edition – $39.99

Starter Edition is limited to 1000 items per transfer.

Professional Edition adds significant value to the Starter Edition with improvements in Security, Performance, Usability and Configurability. It also provides an advanced backup manager, Google Docs backup, and allows an unlimited number of file transfers.

Professional Edition also gives you free minor upgrades and an upgrade to 2.0 when that comes available.

I downloaded the Free Starter Edition to give it a try.  There is an online guide for installing and there are wikis available as well.  Check the Gladinet Wiki for Quick Start Guide or Complete User Guide.  I also found the Gladinet Blog very informative.  They compare Google storage vs. Windows Azure which is a nice read.

Gladinet has been covered before so I’m not breaking new ground here.  The cool thing is there are more ways you can use the software now.  Especially since Google opened up Google Docs to accept any file type.

Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You’ll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don’t convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.

I’m really interested in the ability to transfer photos to Picasa as well.  I’ll try it on my Windows 7 PC and do a follow up with a trial on Windows Home Server.

I was happy to see that I had a choice between 32 bit and 64 bit and as you can see I downloaded the x64 client.

When installing it installed into my (x86) directory though.

Using Gladinet from My Computer

There are several options for backups.  I’m interested in try SkyDrive, FTP, and Picasa for now.

Double click an option to mount the drive.

There is my SkyDrive ready to use.

Does it work with SyncToy?

I was hoping to use SyncToy but alas I was informed that there are some compatibility issues with dates using SyncToy and Gladinet.  I’m going to try anyway!

The transfer was successful but when I looked out on my SkyDrive I didn’t see the file I transferred.  I didn’t even see the folder!  I transferred it to My Documents on SkyDrive and that folder does not show up when I look at the drive via web browser.

The file also doesn’t show up in my local view of SkyDrive.  It looks like this.

Since I can’t find the folder on my web browser I assume that this is my issue and not Gladinet’s.  I’ll try another sync to the public folder.  This time the file was copied, or so it seems.  I still don’t see it as a useable file on the website.

Drag and Drop

I created a simple text file and did a drag-and-drop to the folder to see if it would copy out to the public folder.

A box popped up and let me know it’s working on it and it looks like it did.

So, they were correct.  JerryH from Gladinet tells me, “SkyDrive upload will change the date and time of a file to when the file is uploaded to SkyDrive. SyncToy may use the date and time to check whether the file is there so there is some application compatibility.”

Picasa Online Storage

I’m also interested in archiving my photos to Picasa so I’ll run through that process with Gladinet.  In my mapped drive I simply double-click the Picasa folder and it asks for credentials.  Another box popped up about creating a backup task.  Looks like the client will automate this for you.  That’s something I missed during the SkyDrive test.

Waiting for it to sync.  Once it sync’d up I copied a test folder to my Picasa Gladinet drive and it instantly copied it out to Picasa keeping the folder intact.  I now can use the folders/photos in my WordPress blogs.  This is what I was hoping for with Gladinet.

One word of warning for those of you hoping to use Picasa as online storage.  When downloading photos from a Picasa virtual directory, Picasa API returns the downsized files. For example, a 4M 1600×1067 pix photo can be reduced to about 300K, although it is still 1600×1067 pix.

I read somewhere the OS compatibility list and I can’t seem to find it now.  Windows Server 2003 was on the list.  I’ll test it on Windows Home Server soon.

Desktop

The software comes with tools to aid you in backing up to your cloud services.  This is the Quick Launch Pad.  You can schedule backups with ease starting here.

Select a folder and click Next.

Choose one of the services that you have setup.

It’s very simple.

Add Online Storage to your Gladinet

Start the Quick Launch Pad and click Storage Manager

In storage manager click Mount and you will see all the options you have for storage.  You will first need to establish an account with the service but that is all there is to it.

Conclusion

I was very satisfied with the performance of Gladinet even though I only touched about half of what this software offers.

Picasa is running a special on 200Gb of storage for $50 a year and you get a free Eye-Fi card. With Gladinet and 200Gb for $50 this is a good solution for storing and sharing photos.

I highly recommend checking out the Gladinet blog for more info.  They have some good articles showing you the many ways to use the software.

Stay tuned to the podcast and blog for a give-away of licenses for Gladinet!

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