Being a freelancer I need to carry so many files of my clients with me always. No matter where ever I travel, I want them to be with me always. I usually used to buy Flash Drives and External Hard Disk drive. But nothing was comfortable for me as most of my flash drives went missing while sharing it with friends or while using it on some one else computers. Carrying a External Hard Disk was more tough than the flash drives, I needed to carry them very safely while travelling to avoid any damages.
So I was looking for some Cloud Storage which can act like a Portable / Fixed hard disk on my laptop and computer which can always be in sync. And I tried many cloud storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.. for my purpose and nothing solved my requirement. All the cloud services just created a Folder / Shortcut and it was not convenient to me as I wanted to have multiple Drives on my computers by the way I can organize my files easily.
While searching for a solution to solve my requirement, I came to know about this wonderful tool CloudBerry Drive which can mount various cloud storage solutions as Hard Disk Drive on my windows computers and laptops.
The CloudBerry Drive supports all the leading cloud storage solutions like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure, HP Cloud, Rackspace, Openstacka and Softlayer and can mount them as Hard Disk on the Windows Computers.
Why CloudBerry Drive?
Initially I used Google Drive and Dropbox to keep my files synced between my computers, but the real problem is I don’t want those files to sit on my Hard Drive and eat the free space. I need the client files only when I have to do some work on it, so here the Google Drive and Dropbox failed.
I really wanted a tool which can act like a Fixed Hard Disk on my computer and serve me the files only on demand while they were secured on the cloud storage synced across all my devices.
Here the CloudBerry Drive won !
Storage Support
CloudBerry Drive supports all the leading storage services like Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and more. Further you can mount FTP / sFTP locations too.
While I am already using Amazon S3 for my storage needs, I just created few more Buckets and mounted them as Hard Disks on my Windows Computer using CloudBerry Drive.
Pricing
CloudBerry Drive costs $29.99 for a single license which includes one year free upgrade and support. Apart from the app cost you have to pay the storage cost to the cloud storage provider every month. The price for the storage is very cheaper with almost every provider and it depends upon your monthly usage.
They also offer a 30-Days Unlimited Trail version which lets you to try their application before making the purchase and learn to use it. You can download / buy the CloudBerry Drive at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/amazon-cloud-storage-online-hard-drive.aspx
Installation and Configuration
Installing the CloudBerry Drive is very simple like installing any other windows application. Once installed you have to activate the product and configure your Storage Providers and mount them as Hard Disk drives on your computer.
Before configuring the storage services on the CloudBerry Drive you have to keep the Access Keys of your storage services in hand.
The CloudBerry Lab website have a detailed video guide on How to Configure the CloudBerry Drive with Amazon S3 which is available at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/drive-video.aspx
Security
While all the Cloud Storage services have their own security ways to protect our data the CloudBerry Drive uses high level encryption to securely store our data on the cloud storage. So we don’t have to worry about our data security.
CloudBerry Drive vs Alternatives
While there were few other alternatives for CloudBerry Drive, I prefer to use CloudBerry Drive since the CloudBerry Lab is mainly focused on working with CloudStorage related application development primarily. So I am sure they will always come up with a best in class products focused on cloud storage.
Other CloudBerry Lab Products
Lot of other cloud storage based products were available with CloudBerry Lab to keep our data secured like Image Based Full Desktop backup application, MS SQL Backup Application, Orcale, MS Exchange and Server backup applications too available.
The Complete list of their Products can be found at – http://www.cloudberrylab.com/all-products.aspx