14 DAY TRIAL // The “cloud” is making small but determined steps into the mainstream though most people and businesses are just figuring out how exactly to do it, what works and what doesn't. Businesses and even the more tech-savvy users are already using several services to host and share files online but they offer varying degrees of desktop integration, if any, and almost no interconnectivity. This is where Gladinet Desktop comes in offering a unified desktop client and integration for several cloud services and, with the latest version, even the possibility to do “cloud-to-cloud” backup.
Gladinet Desktop has a clear aim of providing a unified and native interface for cloud storage services greatly simplifying the upload and download process especially useful when dealing with a large number of files. It supports a number of popular services like Google's Docs and Picasa, Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive and cloud offerings from Amazon and others. While the software works well for desktop-to-cloud operations, backing up documents to Google Docs without having to deal with the less than ideal web interface for example, increasingly, users were faced with having to move files from one service to the other.
This was possible until now but it involved the files being first downloaded to a local cache and then being uploaded to the other storage service a process that was somewhat unreliable. Thankfully, Gladinet takes a first step in fixing this in the latest version by allowing cloud-to-cloud operations and even takes it a step further with an automated backup system for Google Docs.
The new option allows users who want to be really, really sure that their files are safe to set up a backup process between two cloud services. The system is completely automated after the initial setup and is relatively easy to configure, just needing to choose the storage service to make the backup to, the interval at which the service will poll for updates and what folders users want to backup. The feature is available for all the cloud services supported except for Google's Picasa.
Gladinet Desktop 1.2.168 is available for download here.