Bob’s recommendations for great tools for managing multiple cloud storage accounts.–PC Pitstop
Better Way to Manage Free Cloud Storage
by Bob Rankin
Juggling Free Cloud Storage Services?
I’ve written about how you can amass over a Terabyte of permanently free cloud storage space by signing up for multiple cloud storage services. The only problem is that you end up with multiple sign-ins, multiple places to search for files, and hassles in moving files from one cloud service to another. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Check out these tools that make your cloud storage look like files and folders on your local hard drive…
Local Access to Cloud Storage
Cloud storage has many nice features, including the ability to access your files from any computer or mobile device, whether you’re at home or on the go.
If you use Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Evernote or Dropbox, you know what I mean. All of them have syncing tools that let you interact with your cloud storage files as if they were stored locally.
But when you have more than one cloud storage provider, things can get complicated. Which website has that photo, document, or video that you’re looking for? Logging into each one and poking around is tedious.
Fortunately, there are several tools that provide a single-sign-on interface to multiple cloud services, and allow you to interact with your files just as if they were local folders on your hard drive.
Managing multiple cloud storage services
NetDrive by Bdrive, Inc., interfaces with multiple cloud services including Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Box.com, Amazon Web Services, and OpenStack, plus any FTP server or WebDAV-enabled Web server. To get started with NetDrive, just download and install its app on a Windows PC; select any of the pre-configured cloud services you want to add; and provide the login credentials for each account.
The NetDrive app will connect to each service and configure it as a drive letter in Windows Explorer’s “Computer” view, labeled with the name and icon of the cloud service. For example, your Dropbox account can become your L: drive, and Google Docs can be your M: drive. You can configure other cloud services, FTP sites, and WebDAV resources manually; just supply the resource’s URL and login credentials.
NetDrive will automatically log you into all of your cloud services each time you restart Windows. You can navigate the folders of each cloud account in Windows Explorer just as if they were folders on your main hard drive. Remote or cloud files behave as if they were local files, and open easily with locally installed programs. You can even drag files from one cloud storage service to another as if they were being dragged from one drive to another.
