How many cloud storage services do you use regularly? Most people use at least one, but there are many who use even more – two, three, five. Who can really say no to free cloud storage services like Dropbox, SkyDrive, Box or Google Drive?
If you’re someone who uses two or more cloud drive accounts, you may be looking for an easier way to manage them all. It’s such an inconvenience having to visit each website separately. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could manage them all from a single location?
As you may or may not know, there are services that let you do just that. One of the newest to come to the scene is MultCloud. It’s a free web app that lets you manage all of your cloud files with ease. Once your cloud drives are connected, you’ll only need one login to access them all. MultCloud also lets you transfer files back and forth between your accounts. Below we’ll take a look at how the service works and some of its main features.
Accounts Setup
Once you create and activate your MultCloud account, you’re ready to start connecting your accounts. The following services are supported: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, SkyDrive, SugarSync and AmazonS3. Adding accounts is easy and pretty self-explanatory.
Since you can add an unlimited number of each type of account (ie. 2 Dropbox accounts, 3 Google Drive accounts, etc), you’re able to customize the display name for each one (ie. Dropbox 1, Dropbox 2, Personal GDrive). This is a feature that is sure to come in handy. Especially since many people have multiple Google accounts – I have three myself.
When connecting your accounts, all services appear to use OAuth, except for SugarSync and AmazonS3. For SugarSync, you’ll need to provide your email and password. For AmazonS3, you’ll need to provide your Bucket Name, Access Key ID and Secret Access Key.
If you’re worried about security, you can read through MultCloud’s security page; it should provide some relief. They guarantee that none of your passwords, data or files are saved, and a 256-bit AES Encryption for SSL is used for transferring your data.
Accessing Files and Folders
MultCloud gives you an organized view of your cloud accounts, files and folders: accounts are listed on the left side, and your files and folders are on the right. You can also click on the little blue arrow next to each account name, this will expand to display all of the folders for that account. It’s also worth noting that you can click on the column headers in the folder/file viewer to sort items by name, modified date or size.
You can open folders and files by double clicking on them. Just know that there are some file types that you can preview and others that you can’t. For instance, I tried to open a music file, but it wouldn’t open at all (no preview window). I then tried to open a PDF file and while a preview window did open up, it was blank.
This is obviously a bug or issue on my end since their product page states that you can preview common document file types like DOC, PDF and XLS. Because of this, I’m not sure if you can actually edit the files from MultCloud, but it will be really great if you can. On the other hand, I was able to preview a JPG image file without any problems.
One feature I really like is the omnibox-like bar that appears at the top and displays breadcrumbs, so that you can easily go back to other folders as needed. To the right of this is a handy search bar, which allows you to search for files and folders across all cloud drives – or just the cloud accounts that you choose (uncheck the ones you don’t want to search).
Interacting with Files
MultCloud has its own right-click menu (within the file/folder viewer area) that brings up quite a few useful options when you right-click a file. You can download, delete, rename, cut, copy, preview (same as double clicking) and share. When you think of sharing, you probably think of sharing to social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
This is not how sharing works on MultCloud though. Instead, you can share with a specific person (via email) or publicly (viaMultCloud link) – much like sharing in Google Drive. When someone clicks on the link, they won’t be able to view the file, they’ll only be able to download it. You’ll also notice an icon in the “Share” column for files that you’ve shared. You can unshare files too, by right-clicking and selecting “unshare.”
You can use the cut/copy options to move or copy files to other cloud drives. For instance, you can copy a file in Dropbox to Google Drive, or move a file in your personal Google Drive account to your Work Google Drive account. You’ll need to right-click the file, choose cut or copy, go to the new location and then right-click in a blank area within the viewing area and choose paste.
Once last thing, deleting a file in MultCloud will delete that file permanently from your cloud drive, so be careful because (as of now) there’s no way to get the file back once deleted. You can also upload files up to 200MB in size to your accounts in MultCloud. Just select a folder and then click the “Upload” button at the top of the page (between “Download” and “New Folder”).
Final Thoughts
MultCloud may not be a game changer, but it’s a useful, time-saving service that plays nice with six well-known cloud services. I do wish that previewing files wasn’t so buggy since it’s a necessary feature. I also wish that you could edit documents and images as this would make MultCloud the ultimate “Multi Cloud” web app.
I’ve tried out similar services in the like Otixo, Primadesk and Joukuu, and we’ve also written about Cloudkafe here in the past; MultCloud definitely holds up to the competition. The interface is clean and simple, plus you can’t beat the price tag of free!
Over to you. Do you use MultCloud or a similar service? Feel free to let us know about your personal experiences in the comments.
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