Do You Want a "Cloud Desktop?" Gladinet's Release Candidate is Here
Gladinet is a free Windows software program that lets you mount cloud storage as local folders on your PC while keeping both locations in sync with each other. It provides access to a number of "cloud" storage services which include: Amazon S3, Google Docs, Google, Picasa, ThinkFree, Zoho, Windows Live SkyDrive, and more. The product, which debuted as a tech preview back in the summer of 2008, has finally reached the release candidate milestone, a point at which the software should finally be more stable, more usable, and (hopefully) bug-free.
It's good to see the company progressing towards their goal of merging cloud and local machine, but we have to wonder if this is really a platform of the future or just a transitional piece meant to tide us over until we can really trust the cloud?
The idea behind Gladinet's cloud desktop software is to bridge the various online services we use regularly with the files and data we keep on our PC's hard drive. Given the recent outages of services like Google's Gmail and Google Docs, for example, some pundits questioned whether cloud computing's image would be tarnished. Others took questioning the cloud to a whole new level of paranoia, claiming that trusting the cloud was "worse than stupidity."
For the most part, though, the outrage over the outages and downtimes suffered in cloud computing are overblown. Even when they last for hours, there are few cases where complete data loss has occurred (e.g. Google Docs comes back up, but your data store is wiped clean)...well, unless you count Ma.gnolia.
But Gladinet seems to tap into that primal fear that comes with the loss of control accompanying cloud computing; the fear that your precious data will one day be lost to the ether. O.K. sure, that's not all the software does. It also connects your computers together so you can share files, provides a platform for different cloud services to interact with each other, and provides tools for easily moving your local data to the cloud. Yet, out of all its features, the fact that you can keep PC and cloud in sync - with a local backup for safekeeping - is probably one of the service's biggest selling points.
Is that the future of cloud computing, though? A combined cloud/PC experience? Or will cloud computing eventually make our hard drives, filled with locally stored files, obsolete? With the rise of netbook computing and mobile computing, it seems that the transition has been directly influenced by the number of web/mobile apps that now replace what local software once provided.
So where does that leave a software program like Gladinet? Is it a useful platform for hybrid computing? Or just a transitional piece holding us over until the cloud is all we use?
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Sounds awesome, but again, privacy issues, as you said in the post. :\
Great for collaboration/working between multiple computers though. And finally something that you can check on all of them/use all of them. :D
For personal use these services are very useful and a great answer to the personal data loss and access problems of a home computer's vulnerabilities. No data or docs on the localhard drive, less problems. It is what I have done with scribd and Google Docs.
But the small and medium business will need more than reassurance that all will be well with these cloud services providers; while the giants have outages and make a Monty Python style apology with a refund of pennies, the cloud start ups are as a whole under capitalized, and prone to sudden and unexpected insolvency.
What cannot be insured, cannot be relied upon. The gulf between moving an internet site's hosting from a dedicated server to a hosted grid, and a small / med business migrating Capital Line of Business to the cloud....is enormous.
http://abmw.wordpress.com/category/cloudcomputing/
What differes this from the other sync clients that most online storage sites has?
If I have www.storegate.com, as an example, the files are sync between comp and cloud. Nothing new with this?
I can see the biggest difference is that it puts the control back into user's hand. Now the backend side(cloud side) is a white box instead of a black box. If you want to pick Amazon S3 or others, you have a choice. Not like you were using one and only one.
DropBox already does the "mount cloud storage as local folders on your PC while keeping both locations in sync with each other".
I haven't looked at the other features of Gladinet, but if that's all there is to it, DropBox has them beat.
Gladinet and Dropbox are apple and orange if compared. Gladinet focus on developing an open platform to support multiple backend cloud services such as those from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and etc. Dropbox has Live Mesh/Live Sync like feature with probably Amazon S3 as the backend. On my machine, I have both. One for backing up my Google Docs into Amazon S3 and SkyDrive, the other for sync.
I'm waiting for the company that moves my whole client to the cloud. My machine becomes a terminal I can use to RDP to my cloud client which connects and syncs to other cloud services.
Then it won't matter what device I'm using or platform I'm on (client wise) - I'll have access to the same data, same OS and much larger, more scalable storage and processing power.
My 2c > http://thingsilearn.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/why-cloud-computing-is-the-future-or-how-the-cloud-ate-my-laptop/
Gladinet does not support proxy, it is very big limitation. Answer from Administrator in their forum killed me:
Agreed. It is a imitation. We don't have environment to test proxy. You may have some problems even after you mount your storage in Gladinet somehow.
@ Jerry:
Regarding your statement about Dropbox vs Gladinet, could you elaborate?
I use Dropbox and find it very useful, but it has only one crucial problem: free accounts are limited to 5GB, and since I cannot afford a paid account, Dropbox falls short in being my perfect solution.
How does Gladinet (used in conjunction with, say, SkyDrive) differ from Dropbox?
If your cloud app relies on 200 kb of ajax and other glittery javascript and browser based databasees, 200 mhz will suck so badly taht you will wish for a 5 year old Dell notebook
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