MultCloud: Manage all Cloud Drives from one location
MultCloud is an online service that provides you with the means to manage all of your cloud hosting accounts, and to transfer data effortlessly between those accounts.
If you have access to more than one cloud drive, and chance is quite high that you do even if you don't use these storage solutions actively, then you may have noticed that it is quite difficult to manage data on all those accounts.
Cloud drive access is limited to each service, and if you want desktop access to your files, you may have installed multiple programs to ensure that.
Multcloud review
MultCloud is an online service that brings many cloud services together in a single interface. The free version is somewhat limited but the restrictions are not that bad. Basically, transfer speed is limited, data traffic is limited to 2TB, and there are no options to schedule file transfers or use filters.
MultCloud supports more than two dozen services or options at the time of writing: Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Drive, OneDrive, Amazon S3, Box, MediaFire, OwnCloud, FTP, SugarSync, Copy, Alresco, Flickr, MySQL, HubiC, WebDav, CloudMe, Cubby and myDrive.
Depending on the selected service, they are either integrated through authorization using the service's API, or directly by entering username, password and in some cases additional information such as a hostname or IP.
The main difference between the two options is that your credentials are save if authentication is used, which is the case for most services, while they are stored by MultCloud if you are asked to enter them directly. The latter opens up a can of (security) worms and may not be worth the benefits.
Ultimately, access to your files is granted for each service you authorize regardless of how that happens.
Each service that you have added to MultCloud is listed on its own in the left sidebar afterwards. You browse folders and files from there, and may use a context menu in the file manager to manage files. Operations include uploads and downloads, deleting or renaming, previewing files, creating new folders or copying files or folders.
The copy command enables cross-service file transfers, but you can use the transfer option displayed at the top of the service as well for that.
Closing Words
MultCloud is an interesting service for a number of reasons. First, it enables you to manage services from a central dashboard. While there is no way to combine all data in a single listing, it makes it easy to manage files nevertheless.
Second, it allows you to transfer files between services without using your own bandwidth. Useful if you need to move Gigabytes of data from one to another, for instance from OneDrive which announced storage reductions recently to a service that you decided to migrate to. The selection of services is excellent as well.
On the downside, you either authorize access to your files to a third-party service, or even hand your login credentials to the service right away which raises both privacy and security questions.
Depending on the files stored online, you may not want to provide a third-party service with access.
MultCloud WAS fine… but they removed sheduled file transfer from free plan few months ago :(
Juicy and tempting, but NO THANKS.
Users (1st party) are giving cloud service providers (2nd party) easy access to their content. Now along comes an aggregator like MultCloud (3rd party), and they get the keys to all content stored by multiple 2nd party service providers.
This is a potential privacy nightmare.
If you are using 2nd party services for backup, encrypt before you upload, and protect your encryption keys / passwords. If you use these services to sync data between your own devices (presumably unencrypted), a more secure alternative might be self-hosted peer-to-peer sync products like Syncthing. Your data is stored only on your own devices, and is TLS encrypted while moving over the internet.
Mr. Brinkmann.
Hello Again.
Perhaps it’s me but . . . I do not put much faith in (security/cloud-based) companies whose websites are NOT Fully 256-bit Encrypted (as in the case of MultCloud)!
i
Storing one’s personal files has always had an intrinsically unsafe element, simply because you leave them in the hands of a second party. Hopefully, your cloud storage provider is a party that you can trust.
But on top of that, giving another third party (like this MultCloud service) access rights to your files seems even more dangerous and (to be frank) outright stupid to me. Is there any iron-clad guarantee that they won’t be harvesting both your data and passwords?
Of course, some people seem to be willing to sacrifice nearly all security and privacy in return for for just a tiny little bit of extra convenience…
As it isn’t mentioned in the article:
There are off-line equivalents acting like virtual stations. (Off-line in their approach to access on-line storage.) ;-)
Among these are Total Commander (with plug-ins, for Windows and Android), ExpanDrive (for Windows and OS X) and Cloud Commander (for OS X and iOS). Some file managers for iOS could probably download a file or directory from one cloud, then upload it to another.
(Total Commander for Android is the only free one of these.)
I didn’t see Mega on that list of supported services, and I doubt I ever will see it. ;) It’s the only cloud service I can *almost* trust, though I don’t even trust them.
And yes, ditto on all the comments here about the security/privacy nightmare that could be brewing with a service like Multicloud. It’s bad enough giving your data to the current bunch of NSA-hooked American companies, but to then give it all over again to a third “all-seeing” company just seems like a bad idea.
Even encrypting the data manually before putting it online is not very compelling. There are suggestions out there that some spy agencies may already have the ability to break some encryption keys in real time. Even if this is not currently true, it will be true soon. Basically, if you put something online, it really doesn’t matter how many layers of encryption it has. It is online FOREVER and it WILL eventually be crackable.
MEGA is supported
One word … Airexplorer
Unfortunately the free version is severely limited, but the pro version, a whopping $19 for lifetime license, is definitely worth a look.
and it looks like Martin has upgraded to WP4.4 from the positioning of the name/email :)
Hi Rick,
Thanks for the tip on Airexplorer, I have been looking for a good cloud sync program (rather than a subscription service) and this works flawlessly, mirror, one-way and even has encryption :)
Because they throttle the speed of the free version to an unstated amount I’m sure I would find it much too restrictive. Plus, subscription based paid apps are simply not on my radar. If I could buy it at a reasonable price and use it until it has outlived its usefulness I might well bite. With some content based exceptions, I won’t generally buy things that make my bank account leak.