COMBINE YOUR CLOUDS
Overloaded with different cloud services? Nik Rawlinson finds out how to maximise your storage and simplify your management
T here’s a lot of free cloud storage out there. Combine free accounts from Dropbox (2GB), pCloud (2GB), OneDrive (5GB), Sync.com (5GB), Amazon Cloud Drive (5GB), MediaFire (10GB), Box (10GB), Google Drive (15GB) and Mega (20GB) and you’ve got almost 75GB of always-on, available-anywhere storage without even trying. And that’s before anything you’re hosting on your own NAS or a shared computer.
But juggling files between multiple cloud providers is far from an ideal solution. It means installing multiple clients on every machine, and makes it harder to organise and share your documents.
The solution is to sign up with a third-party service that can bring together all of your disparate cloud repositories under one easy-to-access account, with a single client to install and log into on every machine. Such software can also provide a convenient way to manage multiple identities with a single provider, such as work and personal accounts. This is something that’s rarely possible when using the provider’s own sync tool; most only work with one login at a time, and will only sync to a single folder on your local machine.
For Dropbox, using a cloud aggregator service even lets you get around the restriction that limits free users to three synchronised devices, as third-party apps don’t count against your client limit.
There are several multi-cloud services to choose from, but they all work in slightly different ways. That means it’s important to make sure that the one you select supports all of the cloud services you use on a daily basis, and can do the things you need. Here’s our rundown of some of the best options.
ODRIVE.COM
PRICE From free to $99 per year
The odrive service runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and it integrates with more than 25 online providers, both free and paid-for, including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. It can also make your files available via FTP, SFTP and WebDAV services, so it’s a good choice for anyone who needs to share large files with people who might not be on a particular cloud platform.
When you install the software, a main odrive directory is created, with a subfolder inside for each cloud service. Remote files can be automatically synced to your local drive so they’re always available even if you lose internet access; you can configure per-file and per-folder synchronisation settings directly within Windows Explorer, using the options that are added to in the right-click context menu.
For any files that aren’t downloaded, odrive creates stubs that appear in Explorer as links. When you want to open one of these, odrive automatically downloads it in the background, just as many native cloud clients do. This naturally requires internet access, and it can mean you have to wait a short while for items to open – but it allows you to browse and search everything that’s in your cloud without having to download dozens of gigabytes of data.
The service’s file-sharing capabilities include optional password protection and link expiry. It’s even possible to encrypt any folder on your cloud drives, concealing not only the contents but also the filename. Encryption and decryption take place within the local odrive client, so unencrypted data isn’t sent over the internet.
You can use most of odrive’s features for free; the basic service supports a single sign-in to each of your cloud accounts, with unlimited syncing and all the features described above. Upgrading to a $99 per year paid account adds support for desyncing files to save local storage, folder-based sync rules and bandwidth management. The company also offers business accounts, starting at $15 per month per user (minimum five users), which add support for Dropbox Teams, Google Workspace, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint.
MULTCLOUD.COM
PRICE From free to $120 per year
MultCloud’s free plan works across more than 30 cloud platforms, including Box, Google Drive and both personal and business editions of Dropbox and OneDrive – a potential advantage over odrive, which requires a paid account for access to business-branded clouds.
The service does have some noteworthy restrictions, however. For one, free accounts are only permitted to transfer a maximum of 30GB a month between clouds. If you need more than this you’ll need to upgrade: the monthly plan costs
$9.90 per month for 150GB of data, while the quarterly plan costs $25 for 200GB of data per month. There’s also an annual plan with no transfer limits for $120 a year, and a lifetime subscription at $399.
It’s also important to note that MultCloud only operates at the cloud-to-cloud level, and doesn’t provide local syncing. This means it’s
ENCRYPTION AND DECRYPTION TAKE PLACE WITHIN THE LOCAL ODRIVE CLIENT
most useful in combination with a native cloud client: for example, you could run the Google Drive client on your personal computer, and use MultCloud to automatically sync files from Dropbox or OneDrive into your Google storage. The web portal lets you configure regular backups from one service to another, or copy individual files around as needed.
If that sounds as though it will suit your way of working, then MultCloud has a number of neat additional features, including the ability to move large files between clouds unattended – just feed it the appropriate URL and it downloads whichever file is at that location to your selected cloud service. Likewise, its FTP synchronisation feature simplifies the task of moving files between servers while maintaining the existing folder structure.
RAIDRIVE.COM
PRICE From free to $2 per month
RaiDrive doesn’t consolidate your cloud files together, but it does let you manage all your services from one place. Once you’ve registered your cloud providers in the RaiDrive client, they each appear in Windows Explorer – and you can add multiple instances of each service, allowing you to (for example) run business and personal Google accounts side by side, and drag and drop files between them. Note, however, that this only works for “real” files that have been downloaded to your hard drive; if you drag a native Google document from one to the other then try to open it in the second account it will fail, as all you’ve really copied across is a link.
The Standard free service allows you to connect up to eight cloud providers at once. Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and ownCloud are fully supported, along with FTP,
SFTP and WebDAV servers.
However, some platforms – including Box, Dropbox Business, Google Workspace, Mega, pCloud and OneDrive Business – are limited to read-only access. You must upgrade to the Professional plan if you need to upload files to them.
The good news is that this won’t break the bank, as it costs just $2 a month. If you’re a student or teacher, you’re looking at $8 a year, and subscriptions for non-profit organisations are $2 a year, with the first year free. As well as unlocking a wider range of services, paid accounts also let you share your mounted cloud drives across your local network, and prevent others from changing or overwriting your files.
AIREXPLORER.NET
PRICE From free to $36
You’d be hard-pressed to find a mainstream cloud service that AirExplorer doesn’t support. Alongside Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega and OneDrive (both regular and business flavours), it will work with OneDrive for China, Russia’s Yandex and South Korea’s Naver. FTP, SFTP and WebDAV are all catered for too, along with Amazon S3, SharePoint Online, SharePoint China and self-hosted options such as ownCloud ( see opposite).
The interface bears more than a passing resemblance to an FTP tool, with side-by-side windows for any two selected services, and the ability to either drag from one to the other, or select a file and click to send it to its neighbour. The entry-level product is free, with no limit to the number of cloud services you can synchronise and transfer between. However, if you’re logging in to enterprise accounts, you’ll be limited to read-only access; upgrading to the
Pro version, at $18 for a year, $25 for two years or $36 for lifetime access, unlocks these and also allows you to set up multiple accounts with each cloud provider. Encryption, scheduled processes, command line access and password protection are all included in the Pro package as well.
If you want to mount cloud services as local drives, you’ll need to install the separate Air Drive Live client ( airdrivelive.com). As with the basic version of Air Explorer there’s a free tier, which in this case supports mounting three cloud services in Windows Explorer. Upgrading for $17 per year or $25 for lifetime use adds support for unlimited drives, password protection and team drives.
EXPANDRIVE.COM
PRICE From $50
ExpanDrive is the only service here that doesn’t offer a free tier, but you can sign up for a fully functional seven-day trial; after that, licensing starts at $50 for a single user, with business plans ranging from $50 per month for 20 licences to $199 per month for 500 licences.
ExpanDrive supports Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive, plus Amazon S3, SharePoint and SFTP. You can browse all of them within the ExpanDrive UI, or mount them within Windows Explorer, and one unusual option is the ability to mount drives in read-only mode, to ensure that remote contents aren’t interfered with. You can also selectively sync files from the cloud to your local drive so they remain accessible when you’re offline – they’ll update automatically the next time you’re online.