Migrating to the Cloud with Gladinet and Google Docs

[Platypus]

I got all excited the other day when I read about Gladinet, a nifty piece of software that lets you connect to on-line storage such as Windows Skydrive and Google Docs, treating the storage as a (Windows) network drive.

"eureka" I thought, why don't I keep all my documents on Google Docs, thereby saving space on my PC, giving me universal access to my data and taking away the worry of losing stuff in the event something goes wrong (see other thread LOL!).

Has anyone done this? Not necessarily using Gladinet and Google Docs, but has anyone decided to put their faith in "the Cloud" ?

P.S. I discovered a great way of transferring ALL my emails from Outlook (almost 10 years' worth) to Gmail a couple of weeks ago, so I've now abandoned Outlook and gone over entirely to Gmail (while retaining my existing POP addresses, all my old emails and contacts). Which I'm very happy with. So far. The same trick works with Outlook Express. Details here if anyone's interested!

[Spacecadet]

Dropbox already does something similar, although it keeps local copies of everything.

What puts me off "the cloud" is that if you're offline you're stuffed, unless I've missed something obvious

[doodab]

I am a bit wary because I haven't actually read all the user agreements in detail, so anything critical is kept as a local file as well or instead of, but I have been using google docs for a few years for note keeping, keeping track of bills & finances, making lists and so on.

I've recently started switching to skydrive / office online. The integration with office 2010 is really good, you can do everything that google docs does from a browser & it has onenote. If you have multiple PCs in multiple places it's pretty much the way forwards.

Hotmail has been my main email since before Microsoft bought it. I have a gmail account as well because I have an android phone, but hotmail works well enough in the phone browser that I haven't bothered to switch.

I was thinking of moving my remaining rented server into the cloud as well but it turns out it's cheaper to keep the existing physical box.

[Sysman]

I'm gradually making more use of a "partial cloud" solution of my own. This initially came about from using a shared guest PC at work that I didn't want to leave my stuff on.

I already had all my email set up using IMAP, but now I have moved to using the ample storage that came with my website to store work in progress as attachments. Being a backup freak I do make sure I have adequate copies of everything, so I'm not using it to save disk space. I use rsync on a regular basis, and take periodic backups of the lot.

[d000hg]

Dropbox already does something similar, although it keeps local copies of everything.

What puts me off "the cloud" is that if you're offline you're stuffed, unless I've missed something obvious

WHS. DropBox and other similar tools let you view online data in convenient ways, with/without local sync. I'm fine having my emails stored online since if I can't get online I can't email anyone anyway, but documents I want locally.

[Platypus]

Dropbox already does something similar, although it keeps local copies of everything.

What puts me off "the cloud" is that if you're offline you're stuffed, unless I've missed something obvious

Yes, I also have Dropbox, but for some stuff, I just don't want or need a local copy (e.g. photos, old documents). Which is why I thought that a "network drive" in the cloud would be very handy. I'll carry on playing with this, but the first thing I've noticed is that Gladinet's upload facility is V E R Y S L O W and sometimes not 100% reliable. This is of course not a good thing if one's going to rely on on-line server storage for important documents !

Thanks all for interesting comments

[Jog On]

I have a VPS server which I've used for a couple of years now for backup and a bit of plan B dev stuff. It's nice because I can mstsc to it from anywhere but I'm looking into more sophisticated cloud stuff as that's what I'd like to start specialising in (App-V/Hyper-V/Med-V/*anything*-V).

It has a server OS (win2k3) on which is handy for some things but not ideal now that plan B involves a business partner and soon a bunch of outsourcers. For this reason I'll be looking into a cloud solution that involves shared data storage, company email and certain apps as well as a CRM.

Reckon if I can get this all working so my outsourcers can log into a Jog LTD virtual desktop and follow checklists etc then this cloud stuff might be quite useful.

Are you looking to use Iaas, Paas or Saas?

[Platypus]

I have a VPS server which I've used for a couple of years now for backup and a bit of plan B dev stuff. It's nice because I can mstsc to it from anywhere but I'm looking into more sophisticated cloud stuff as that's what I'd like to start specialising in (App-V/Hyper-V/Med-V/*anything*-V).

It has a server OS (win2k3) on which is handy for some things but not ideal now that plan B involves a business partner and soon a bunch of outsourcers. For this reason I'll be looking into a cloud solution that involves shared data storage, company email and certain apps as well as a CRM.

Reckon if I can get this all working so my outsourcers can log into a Jog LTD virtual desktop and follow checklists etc then this cloud stuff might be quite useful.

Are you looking to use Iaas, Paas or Saas?

I'm sorry but I don't have a clue what you've told me or what you asked

EDIT: (thanks, Google). I'm not looking at Iaas, Paas or Saas, just on-line storage for now, retaining my current Client platform (local PC) for now

[Jog On]

I'm sorry but I don't have a clue what you've told me or what you asked

MS virtualisation technologies- there are other companies (Citrix, VMware) that have been doing this type of thing but I'm going the MS route.

Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (Saas) - different cloud services