Get Amazon Cloud Drive on Your PC with Gladinet
Amazon Cloud Drive is a formidable new entrant in the cloud storage wars. Battling such heavyweights as Dropbox and SugarSync, you get 5GB of free storage just for signing up. (For details, see our recent cloud storage roundup that pits the five biggest names in online storage solutions against one another.) But Amazon has a few key deficiencies, not the least of which is no desktop integration. Problem solved.
Almost no sooner than Amazon Cloud Drive hit the Web, there's now a third party solution that maps the service to a drive letter, fully integrating it onto your Windows desktop. Gladinet has been around for a while -- Rick told you how you could use it to add SkyDrive to your desktop a few years ago -- but now it has gotten Amazon Cloud Drive compatibility as well.
If you're not already using Gladinet, just install the small program and then choose Amazon Cloud Drive from the (lengthy) list of supported services. Add your username and password, and voila! It's now a mapped drive on your PC. You can copy files to and from the Amazon service just as if it were any other networked drive.
Two caveats: First, you'll need to log into your Amazon Cloud Drive account and upload at least one file the Web way before Gladinet will be able to work. And while you can blissfully use the free version of Gladinet without ever upgrading to the full $50 version, know that as a free user, you're limited to 1000 file operations per "task." That means you can't use Gladinet to perform large-scale automated operations (like backup or syncing a huge number of files simultaneously), though I suspect most people will never, ever run into this limitation in normal operation.
Photo courtesy Flickr user Kevin Dooley
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