If I spend the first several paragraphs apologizing and making excuses for not posting a column since April 2nd (ouch!), I’ll just be adding insult to injury. The Ur-Guru said to blame him, but he’s only been here since April 24th, so that won’t work. I just got caught up in other things—and I only wish all of it had been high-paying client work, which is the kind of excuse I like to be able to make.
Anyway, here at last is the review of Gladinet Cloud Desktop that I promised Jerry Huang ages ago.
The interesting thing about Gladinet is that it lets you back up to multiple cloud storage sites simultaneously. It also maps those sites as “My Gladinet Drive” in Windows Explorer so you can drag and drop from them. Given the awkwardness of reaching some of these services through their own interfaces, that’s a considerable benefit right there.
Once you install the program, there are a couple of screens of settings to configure.
First, enter your license key if you have one. A home-user license for Gladinet Desktop Professional is $39.99 and a commercial license is $59.99. FTC disclosure: Jerry gave me a license key so I could test all the program’s capabilities. Then register with Gladinet. (Give them your name and e-mail address.)
Next, add some storage. I was impressed at the number and variety of possible storage locations, some of which I hadn’t heard of, and some of which I hadn’t known you could use as storage locations. I initially checked Google Docs and Amazon S3, but later signed up for Azure Blob Storage from Microsoft to make it a better test. (And what a nuisance that was—far more trouble than signing up for an Amazon S3 account, let me tell you. And what kind of name is “Blob,” anyway?)
Once you’ve chosen your storage locations, Gladinet will show you your general information and give you the option to change settings such as the drive letter it maps to (I wasn’t using “Y” for anything else, so I left it), whether to encrypt your profile, and so on.
Before you can use the storage options you checked off, you have to provide login credentials. This was not too tricky with Amazon S3, since I’d had to do it with several other programs already and knew where to find the information. It was also fairly simple with Google docs. It was notably confusing with Azure Blob and took several tries before I had the right information in the right place. That’s not Gladinet’s fault, mind you, but a certain lack of clarity on Microsoft’s part. Maybe if you’re a Microsoft developer you understand these things intuitively. If so, I don’t think the Azure Blob service is really meant for anyone else yet. But I digress.
If you use Skype, you might get an error message from Gladinet saying that Port 80 is blocked. Jerry says the easiest way to fix that is to go into your Skype options under “Connection” (in Advanced settings) and uncheck the box that says “Use port 80 and 443 alternatives for incoming connections.”
After setup is complete and you’ve mounted your virtual directories, you have several options. Gladinet installs a fairly sophisticated tool in your system tray/notification area/whatever they call it in Vista and Windows 7, and you can just right-click that to start the Gladinet Cloud Explorer, the Backup Manager, or the Task Manager—or to run backup tasks directly. You can start the Gladinet Management Console from the Start menu, as well, and the Gladinet Quick Launch screen will pop up when you boot your machine unless you do something to make it go away.
There are several options for backup with Gladinet. You can choose to back up all documents, pictures, “musics”, videos, folders, or select specific items. I wanted a relatively quick test, not an exhaustive hours-long marathon with my upstream connection speed as a bottleneck.
As you can see from the screenshot, Gladinet had no trouble seeing my network drives and considered all of them valid sources for backup, though it does warn that backups may not be real-time. Since I wasn’t planning to use it for continuous syncing, I wasn’t worried about that.
If you do choose to back up all your “musics” or videos or document, Gladinet will go through all your drives to index those files. That can be a time-consuming process and slow down your system, so it warns you about that.
In this case, I just opted to back up my FileSlinger™ newsletter directory to all three backup destinations: Amazon S3, Google Docs, and Azure Blob.
I got a prompt from Google Docs asking me whether I wanted to convert my Microsoft Office Word 2007 documents into Google Docs format or leave them as they were, but otherwise the job ran smoothly and quickly.
Once I’d run the backup, it was easy to go into the explorer and confirm that the files had, in fact, been backed up.
Though the interface can be a little tricky (between first testing Gladinet and writing this review I forgot about how a few things worked), the product is versatile and does what it claims to and more than I used it for. (You can schedule backups or use Gladinet for continuous backup.) And, of course, if you don’t want to customize backups, you can use the simpler options and the system tray interface. The hardest thing may well be setting up your cloud storage accounts, as true cloud storage is still much more the province of geeks than online backup is.
Contest
For those who have hung in there in my absence, I have two free licenses of Gladinet Desktop Pro to give away. The two best (meaning most creative and entertaining) answers to the question “Why did Microsoft call its cloud storage Blob?” will win. (The judges are the Ur-Guru and me. Criteria entirely subjective.) Post your answers to the comments. You have as long as I was late to enter.
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Once upon a time, in 1995, there was a Microsoft product known as Bob. As originally envisioned, Bob was the computer user’s companion, touring the user through different rooms of Bob’s house to make tasks intuitive and fun, with a hint of adventure as the user explored a virtual world of productivity.
Unfortunately, Bob was not very popular, except perhaps with users who love dogs talking through pop-up balloons. (Perhaps these were the same users who formed the focus group that gave us Clippit/Clippy. A talking paperclip? Wha!?)
Over time, the remaining faithful Microsoft Bob users started gathering clutter in their Public Safe Rooms. They were, at long last, forced to go back to the bleak and boring Windows 95 interface, with no talking puppy or chiming grandfather clock to project a “welcome home” feel. Bob was almost forgotten.
Bob had long since given up on maintaining his Checkbook, and using the Letter Writer. His E-mail Box had gathered more than ten years of dust, and parts of the house were falling apart. In spite of all this, there was one part of the house that stood strong: the Public Safe. Ah, the good ol’ Public Safe! Storage organized the way the user wanted, and easy to access.
At Microsoft, the time came to name a new online storage product, but no one could settle on a single choice. Microsoft Buena Vista? (No, Disney would sue.) Microsoft Tower? (Sounds too lofty.) Microsoft Vault? (Do we really want users thinking of Goldman Sachs?)
One young software engineer with a penchant for computer history had an idea. “We already own the trademark for Microsoft Bob; how about that? Think about data bobbing, or bubbling, in and out of the system….”
The marketing team didn’t have many better ideas, so they went with Microsoft Bob as the code name. “We’ll come up with a better name when we get closer to RTM,” one marketing employee said.
Fast forward a little while longer. The engineering team, on the whole, hated the code name “Bob”. It was getting close to public release time, so certainly a new name would be chosen soon.
But the code name was intended to be the real name of the product at RTM time. Marketing was happy with Microsoft Bob and forged ahead with it. There was just one little snag.
On the projector was a relatively dry presentation, with bullet points illustrating the product’s features and target market segments to upper management. After the usual “ooh”s and questions about return on investment, the presentation had one final slide to illustrate the product’s new name. When the presentation reached that slide, the meeting attendees let out a collective gasp.
Just before the presentation, one marketing employee decided to add a little color commentary, and so researched the history of Bob. He found an old copy of the program in Microsoft’s vaults, installed it to a Windows 95 test workstation, and started it up. He was shocked to find out how Bob had been faring.
Many years went by with Bob left all alone by those users who were first welcomed into his home. Without user interaction, he fell into a deep depression and hid away from the rest of the world. Bob stopped shaving, the dog died from neglect, and consumption of endless comfort junk foods caused Bob to gain a tremendous amount of weight. Eventually it became a chore just for Bob to walk from the couch to the refrigerator. His on-screen avatar had become so large that only one-third of the screen remained for all application tasks.
It was clear that the name “Bob” would not do for this product. Bob just wasn’t the kind of guy you would associate with that name anymore: an average middle-management type. He was now… a blob.
With only an hour left for the executive presentation, the marketing employee didn’t have time to come up with a new name. He quickly ran a search-and-replace on the Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation, and accompanying Microsoft Office Word document, to add one letter to the product name. And so, Microsoft Blob was born.
Bob’s legacy remains. He is now a permanent resident at a treatment facility for bloated applications. But don’t worry; Bob finally has friends who visit the facility on a regular basis, such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server, and Internet Information Services.
Bob is no longer alone.
Hello,
I have been using Gladinet for approximately 3 years. I started with the basic free edition and moved on to the Pro, fully paid edition.
It is used primarily for documents and the odd large business presentation. No pictures, movies, or anything more than 5mb.
Whilst it works fine for smaller files (less than 1mb), the software is severely restricted for files over 1mb. It downloads them two or three times before it manages to open them, it is abysmally slow ( one or two minutes to opening), and sometimes it simply does not open them at all. Numerous email exchanges with the support team later, having gone through debates on internet speed, firewall connections, settings, etc, etc, and having found out they were all ok, the concluding remark is “uninstall and reinstall”!!! Even so, problems persist. The software is basically good but is not designed to handle large files.
In summary, if you have small files and want quick access via a “drive”, it works. But do not expect to manage a large file portfolio via gladinet. You will simply end up back using the web portal like you always did before gladinet…