Gladinet Cloud Desktop 3 Review

Gladinet is one of the best application to connect you from your desktop to the cloud. Last year about this time, we talked about how you can use it to backup and sync your Google Documents. A year later, which is now, they have released a new version of their Gladinet Cloud Desktop which brings better and seamless desktop integration with your system. And yes, thanks to Gladinet, we have a free giveaway for this great software. Read on for more details.

What’s new

The overall feel of Gladinet has changed – it is a lot easier to navigate through now. There is now a desktop console for you to manage everything. The shiny new interface takes the place of using Windows Explorer to navigate through your documents.

I like the addition of the tabs at the top of the desktop application window. Coupled with the onscreen instructions, the setup for everything went a lot smoother than with the previous version.

There are 3 main sections: Cloud Storage Drive, Cloud Sync Folder and Cloud Backup.

Cloud Storage Drive

When you connect Gladinet with the various cloud services (Amazon S3, Skydrive, Box.net, Google Docs and many more), it will mount the cloud storage as a network drive in your system. You can then drag and drop files to the cloud storage just like how you do it in local drive.

Cloud Backups

With Gladinet 3.0 Desktop, you can easily schedule backups. There is an easy to follow backup wizard that walks you through the steps. What’s nice about the setup wizard is there are a few easy steps and not a lot of choices in the drop downs, making it a fast process to create several custom backups.

You have a mirrored backup option. This acts in much the same way as if you use Mozy or Dropbox. When you save a copy of a file, the file is replaced with the new version. This means, no matter where you access the file from, you will see the most recent version.

What is nice about these backups is you have a choice of how you choose what you want to back up. You can either choose a folder to backup or you can choose a particular file type (like pictures or documents). Within the segment of pictures, you can choose the file types you want Gladinet to scan for (e.g. jpg, bmp, png…)

There is also a Snapshot backup (requires additional Cloud Backup license) that can run scheduled backup and create multiple snapshots with version control.

Cloud Sync

A Cloud Sync Folder allows you to automatically sync files across multiple computers. This is a great replacement for your “My Documents” folder.

Files placed in the designated folder are synchronized to your other computers you use with the same Cloud Sync folders enabled.