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Make SkyDrive a Virtual Drive

April 21st, 2009 by David Bradley >> 11 Comments

SyncToyMicrosoft offers everyone who registers with their free Live service for email, websites, and instant messaging, storage space of up to 25 gigabytes. That’s plenty of room to store thousands of files including photos, you mp3 backups, documents and more.

The space is known as SkyDrive, its disk space in the cloud, see? However, it has several shortcomings not least the way you have to upload and retrieve the files you wish to store. So, in steps Gladinet. This free tool (a Pro version with more features is available) essentially makes your SkyDrive account into a virtual drive on your desktop so that you can access it right from within Windows Explorer. It “mounts” your SkyDrive account on your system, in other words.

One of the major limitations of SkyDrive (until now) was that you couldn’t add whole folders at a time. Gladinet gets around that problem, although it doesn’t work with public folders (Gladinet is only in beta).

Hook up your SkyDrive mounted using Gladinet to a backup tool, such as SyncBack or Microsoft SyncToy, and you may have a free alternative to Carbonite and other online backup systems. Incidentally, it’s always worth keeping an offsite backup as well as a backup of your data on CD, DVD, thumb drive, or external hard drive.

Gladinet also works with Google Docs (there is a tool for allowing you to use your 7 Gb of GMail space as a virtual drive too), PicasaWeb, and Amazon S3 accounts.

At the time of writing, the Beta 2 version of Gladinet was scheduled for release at the end of March 2009.


Leave a comment ↓

  • Dobi // Apr 22, 2009 at 11:28 am

    Sounds great!! But for me, nothing compares with SafeCopy Backup. It’s really easy to use, I can easily share file over 1GB. Works with mac, iPhone, USB Drives. Plus I can use one account for all my computers. And has many more features that I couldn’t find on other online backup providers.

  • David Bradley // Apr 22, 2009 at 11:43 am

    Is SafeCopy Backup free? SkyDrive offers 25 Gb of free space. “Google Drive” almost 8Gb

  • troy // Apr 22, 2009 at 8:45 pm

    I saw your SafeCopy question and use it as well. It’s not free. It’s $50 per year for 150GB and $75 for 250GB. The best part is that I can backup all my computers to my single account. I wouldn’t typically buy a backup plan for my old laptop, but it’s nice to go ahead and add it to the same account for no additional cost.
    There are ton of choices out there, but I am happy with http://www.SafeCopyBackup.com.

  • Dobi // Apr 23, 2009 at 7:19 am

    Hi David,

    No SafeCopy is not free but it lets you backup upto 150GB for only $50/year. You can check their website, here’s the address http://www.safecopybackup.com.

  • David Bradley // Apr 23, 2009 at 9:22 am

    How does it compare to Carbonite, the company Leo Laporte the so-called Tech Guy touts endlessly?

  • Dobi // Apr 23, 2009 at 10:18 am

    I had the same question before I used SafeCopy. Here are some of the features I found digging and asking SafeCopy itself.

    For starters, you can use one account for all your computers. You can backup USB, external and network drives. You can maintain previous file versions and deleted files for unlimited days. You can share files and many more features. I can go all day long.

  • Mike Blyth // Apr 26, 2009 at 1:40 pm

    Lately I’ve been using Dropbox. The free version stores only 2 GB but it’s very convenient and transparent. Anything you put into your local Dropbox folder is automatically synchronized (both directions) with your online copy, and a differencing engine is used so that only the changes to your documents need to be transmitted. That’s great for people like us in Africa with very limited (and expensive) bandwidth.

  • Andy // May 23, 2009 at 10:36 am

    Indeed Gladinet is very nice. As of May 21, it’s out of beta.

    Btw, I prefer Windows Live Mesh to Dropbox. It offers 5GB of free storage automatically sync’ed.

  • David Bradley // May 26, 2009 at 11:46 am

    MS SkyDrive is 25Gb though…

  • Aschwin // Jun 19, 2009 at 8:19 am

    Gladinet Free does NOT support the Sky Drive Functionality.
    :-(
    So again we have to pay for MickeySoft Services

  • David Bradley // Jun 19, 2009 at 8:24 am

    Aschwin, are you sure? I see SkyDrives when I run Gladinet Free…