Cloud Storage & Local Hard Drive

Cloud Storage is cheap, typically around 15 cents/GB/month for 99% uptime and 99.9999% durability.

What is cheaper? Local hard drive! You can get a 250G Western Digital drive for $69.99.  If you have to replace it every two years, it is 1 cents/GB/month.  Local hard drive is 10 times cheaper and many times faster.

Well, I know, this is not a fair comparison. With cloud storage, you get offsite storage, you get anywhere access and you get unlimited storage provisioned right when you need it and the list can go on and on.

However, this 10 to 1 cost ratio does bring up a valid argument – How to best leverage local hard drive to make the cloud storage solution even more useful, with almost no additional cost?

When the cloud storage and local storage work in tandem, it brings out the best of both worlds.

For example, you can wish for a desktop sync folder which is local, anytime you save to this folder, the file can be picked up and send to Amazon S3, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Windows Azure, Nirvanix or any cloud storage of your choice.

Another example, you can wish for a file server which is on the local network, anytime you save to the file server, the file is first saved to the file server and also a second copy is sent from file server to the same Amazon S3, AT&T cloud storages.

The third example, you can wish for a backup solution sitting on your important PCs, automatically backing up the local files to the cloud storage.

What is in common of all the 3 examples? First, they both take advantage of local hard drive and remote cloud storage. Second, they are all part of the Gladinet Cloud Access Solutions!

In the first example, you can use Gladinet Cloud Desktop to setup a desktop folder as a monitored backup folder. The software will monitor the changes in the folder and send changes to the cloud. In addition, you get a mapped network drive to do ad-hoc transfers.

In the second example, you can use Gladinet CloudAFS™, which attaches cloud storage to a file server as tier2 storage.

In the third example, you can use Gladinet Cloud Backup as a windows service to backup live documents, files-in-lock to the cloud.

The cloud storage and local hard drive is a win-win combination. Gladinet Cloud Access Solutions brings you the best of both.

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