Fancy a walk in the clouds

They say that the origins of cloud computing can be traced back to 1960s, and in 1980s, there were first attempts to provide a mechanism for accessing data from anywhere. However it took the 21st century to arrive for the cloud storage services to gain popularity among both companies and individuals. Moreover, it’d be safe to say that nowadays keeping one’s data online has become a norm rather than exception.

Advantages offered by cloud storage services to companies have a very significant monetary value. Keeping data online reduces energy consumption, decreases expenses on security systems to protect data from unauthorized access, storage space and maintenance work. Do not forget about the advantage of data backup – say, if a heavy snowfall or a political upheaval disrupts normal life and work in your country, your data stored on a server in Country X is as safe as ever.

For individuals use of cloud storage services also means monetary benefits, as well as convenience in carrying out one’s daily tasks. For us the first and foremost benefit it offers is freeing space on your hard disk. Zillions of photos, videos and other media content, work files going back and forth between you and your teammates – it takes no time to run out of space on your Mac’s hard drive and exceed the limits of your mailbox. Do yourself a favor – keep all of your data online. You’ll have access to it at all times from anywhere from any device of yours – an office desktop, tablet, mobile phone, laptop, you name it! Collaborating with your colleagues and friends become so much easier too – they can work with the latest versions of shared files, exchange comments and notes and make changes on the fly.

Some users are concerned about their data “out there” not being safe. Do not worry, cloud service are far better at protecting your data than you are. Leave the task of securing your data to professionals; be sure that they employ the latest security systems and encryption technologies you probably haven’t heard of yet.
As for the data backup – it is not only companies who might suffer a huge loss when a hurricane hits their server room. Actually you do not even need to wait for a natural disaster, spill your morning coffee on your laptop and the many hours of work on the sales report are gone waste. Unless you have uploaded the latest version of your report online, of course.

Choose cloud storage service appropriate for you.

Convinced now in the many advantages of cloud storage services? We hope you are. Now it is time for you to choose a cloud storage service that meets your requirements. There are many various options on the market. Say, mobile cloud storage is what you use when you sync your phone. In case you lose your mobile, all its data can be downloaded on your new device anytime. Public cloud storage services typically require a subscription for a certain period of time. You create a login and password, upload your data and work with it whenever required. Also there are privately available and hybrid cloud storages.

It is likely that after checking pros and cons of various cloud services you will decide to use several of them. Sure, it is perfectly fine, it’s just that you need to figure out how to manage the contents stored there – upload and download files and folders, etc. One way of doing it is the web interface of a cloud service; another is an application client. For those who would want to free some space on their hard disks, there is a third party software solution called CloudMounter. The difference between this solution and a native application client is that the latter forces you to sync data stored online with the data on your Mac so basically you duplicate files both on your hard disk and the cloud storage. With CloudMounter the process is slightly different, the data gets copied to your hard drive only if you choose to open it from the storage. If you do not, the data remains online – thus you do not waste your hard drive space. CloudMounter can mount Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3 on your Mac as if they were additional hard drives. It also supports WebDAV protocol and connecting to FTP, FTPS and SFTP servers. This application is likened to a terminal for accessing multiple cloud storage service from a single point.