Cloudeight Windows Tips and Tricks

Do you have a lot of documents, pictures or other files you wish you could make accessible from any computer - or keep them safe just in case?

Let's face it, most of us aren't too faithful about making backups. When something happens and everything is gone we promise ourselves we are going to start making and keeping good backups.

But keeping good backups is sort of like going on a diet. When you start out you normally are filled with motivation and desire to lose weight. As time passes, the desire fades right along with the motivation.

So right after a hard drive crash or after going trough a Windows re-install, you're pretty motivated to keep good backups. But, time passes, Windows is running pretty good and so your motivation fades and so does your desire to do your backup routines. Suddenly, without warning, you need your backups because the inevitable computer thing happens - your computer goes belly up -and your backups are months out of date.

What if we showed you a way go add a six gigabyte hard drive (that's big enough to store 60,000 100KB digital photos) and it cost you nothing at all but a few minutes of time?

If you have a Gmail account (which offers, by-the-way, over six gigabytes of storage space) you have an extra hard drive already. All you need now is a convenient way to use it.

Digiknow there's a tool that allows you to access your Gmail account storage as if it were another hard drive? Right from Windows Explorer. It's true. It's called Gmail Drive and here's what the author says:

"GMail Drive is a Shell Extension that creates a virtual drive in the Windows Explorer, allowing you to use your Google Mail account as a storage medium. It allows you to do basic file manipulation, such as copy and delete, on files inside the GMail folder. Because it is a Shell Extension, the interface you work in is Windows Explorer itself. GMail files are physically stored as e-mails on your Google Mail account. The files are stored in mail attachments, and the filename and file information (such as file size) is stored in the message subject line...."

When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the Gmail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer. You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag'n'drop like you're used to with the normal Explorer folders.

Because the Gmail files will clutter up your Inbox folder, you may wish to create a filter in Gmail to automatically move the files (prefixed with the GMAILFS letters in the subject) to your archived mail folder.

Please note that GMail Drive is still an experimental tool. There's still a number of limitations of the file-system (such as total filename size must be less than 65 characters). Since the tool hooks up with the free Gmail Service provided by Google, changes in the Gmail system may break the tool's ability to function. I cannot guarantee that files stored in this manner will be accessible in the future...."

OK. All the details have been covered including the author's cautionary notes. If you're looking for a way to easily backup those precious, irreplaceable photos, documents or files, you might want to give Gmail Drive a try. We've tested it and it appears to work flawlessly.

We've tested Gmail Drive on Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows XP and found no problems with it. If you don't yet have a Gmail account you can get one free by going to http://www.gmail.com/ .