Cloud Xtender, what, when, where and why?

Well, we are getting close to our first Cloud Xtender beta release. We have had a lot of interest in Cloud Xtender, and have received many questions about the product features and when it will be released. So I thought I would throw up a quick post to answer some of these questions. First up the features… well, while I do not want to give to much away, what I will do is lay out some of the prominent features and give a basic overview of how Cloud Xtender works.

Cloud Xtender allows a users to create a local drive on their machine that points to one or more cloud drives. The number and type of cloud providers is not limited, and you specify rules that determine file placement. For example, a user could create a drive that points to 10 different free Google drives accounts, giving a total of 150 GB of free cloud space (of course you can add more accounts later). The user then specifies a rule that define where files are stored, which might be either an “even” rule (cloud drives are filled evenly), or “cascading” rule (cloud drives are filled one after the other). Now let’s say the same user want to store a photo on an Amazon S3 Glacier drive, he then creates folder in his Cloud Xtender drive, then creates a rule for that folder that points directly to the S3 drive!

One of the most commonly asked questions about this is “Are the files stored locally and sync’d to the cloud, or are they just in the cloud”. Well the short answer is, you can have either. Files can be a) stored in the cloud only (no local copy), b) stored locally and sync’d bidirectionally. One of the key issues with cloud only storage is performance, parsing the cloud every time you browse the file system is a performance killer, we have solved this with some very clever caching technology. Browsing a Cloud Xtender file system is as fast as browsing your other local drives.

And finally, the question that is most often asked, when is this going to be ready? Well soon is the plan… we have most of the technology in place now, as a lot of the Cloud Xtender code is shared with Drive Bender’s new cloud duplication technology. From here we will be releasing a beta, taking feedback and suggestions, then moving pretty quickly on to a release.

Finally I just want to mention the Drive Bender v2 release… so far, so good. We have had some excellent feedback (everyone seems to love the new UI), and we must have done something right because sales are the best they have been this year! There are a couple of minor issues we are sorting, and plan to post an update in the next day or so.