If you use the internet at all these days, odds are that some of your data will be stored online. Whether it be emails and attachments in GMail, photos in Picasa, documents in Google Docs or file in Box.net. The possibilities of what we can do online are incrementing fast. In just the past few years, we have seen online tools for editing everything from documents and images to videos flourish. In is only natural that over time we will be having a greater amount of our data online.

Gladinet Cloud desktop is an application which lets you access your cloud storage as easily as you would any removable drive, and provides a number of tools which allow for greater control over the data you store online.

With Gladinet Cloud Desktop, one can configure Storage providers -- which would be the online services you use for storing your data -- and map the storage they provide to folders in a virtual drive. These folders will then display the files you have online, and you will be able to upload and download files from your storage provider by simply copying files to and from the virtual folders.

List of storage providers configured with Gladinet Cloud Desktop

Gladinet Cloud Desktop uses a flexible system of plug-ins to connect to a variety of services, and best of all Gladinet Cloud Desktop provides a SDK for developers to create their own plug-ins to extend the number of services available through the application. The application comes with support for quite a few services out-of-the-box – through plug-ins bundled with the application – and can connect to:

• Amazon S3
• AT&T Synaptic Storage
• Box.net
• EMC Atmos
• Google Docs
• Google Picasa
• Nirvanix Storage
• Windows Azure Blob Storage
• Windows Live SkyDrive

Mounting a virtual directory with Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

Besides these service providers, you can also configure Gladinet Cloud Desktop to connect to an FTP server, or any WebDav service. You can consolidate your off-computer storage locations even more by mounting network locations in your Windows network. For Google Docs, Gladinet Cloud Desktop even supports Google Apps domains, however you only in the Professional version. For Windows Live SkyDrive, Gladinet Cloud Desktop can even mount shared folders.

Gladinet Cloud Desktop creates its own virtual drive (by default "Z:" drive) and mounts each storage provider in a virtual directory under the Gladinet Cloud Desktop drive. So if you have Google Docs, and Picasa enabled as storage providers, you will see a directory "Google Docs" and another for "Picasa" in your Gladinet drive. While this system of having all your online storage services as virtual folders in a drive makes sense, an option to have a separate drive for each storage provider would have been great – although for most people, this will be the desired setting anyway.