Turn Amazon Cloud drive into desktop-accessible storage

As you may recall, Amazon recently unveiled its new Cloud Drive service, which provides 5GB of free online storage. (Elsewhere I explained how you could bump your limit to 20GB for under a buck.) The only downside? To access it, you have to use Amazon's Web-based interface. It's not bad, but not nearly as convenient as, say, a local hard drive.

Enter Gladinet Cloud Desktop, which makes your Amazon Cloud Drive accessible from within Windows Explorer, just like, say, a flash drive. (Incidentally, it can do likewise with your Gmail, Picasa, SkyDrive, and other accounts.) It's free, it's easy, and it works.

After installing the program, just choose Amazon Cloud Drive from Gladinet's list of supported services. Then enter your username and password, and presto: the program "maps" your storage as a drive on your PC. From there you can copy files to and from it like you would any other drive (albeit a little more slowly -- they are moving to the Internet and back, after all).

By the way, this won't work unless you've already uploaded at least one file to your Cloud Drive using conventional means (i.e. Amazon's Web interface). Also, if you want to do any heavy-duty file syncing, plan on investing in the $50 Pro version of Gladinet. (I think most users will be able to get by just fine with the free version.)

If you took advantage of Google's generous Cloud Drive offer, Gladinet Cloud Desktop gives you the tools to make the most of it.The software is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions for Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

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