Getting Most Out Of The SkyDrive: Part 2

As we know, SkyDrive is a cloud storage service provided by Microsoft and comes at free of cost with each Windows live account. SkyDrive provides 7GB of free storage and if you are old customer of SkyDrive then you might have 25GB of storage. In old days SkyDrive was accessible only with it’s web interface but two weeks ago Microsoft launched their official desktop app of SkyDrive for Windows and Mac based PC’s.

Just a few days after launch of SkyDrive, I wrote a post on Getting most out of the SkyDrive. That post featured some common things what you can do with SkyDrive. If you have missed that post then here is outline for you

  • Use it as storage
  • Move your My Documents to SkyDrive
  • Use to sync files between two or more PC
  • Use as backup

You can read full post by following this link.

Apart from this, while stumbling on the web for cloud storage, I found a new useful trick which can be done with SkyDrive. This can be done with Google Drive and Dropbox also but SkyDrive comes with more storage than Dropbox and Google Drive hence we are doing it on SkyDrive. Many of you have 25GB storage while some may have 7GB, 7GB storage is quite big than 5GB of Google Drive and much bigger than the 2GB of Dropbox.

Many of you already installed and started using SkyDrive from your PC using SkyDrive app. The SkyDrive app creates a folder on your PC and synchronize all files from that folder. You can cut, copy, paste files and folder in or out from SkyDrive. Once you pasted a file in that folder it will be uploaded to cloud and also will be synced to all other devices connected to your account.

Now the trick

Imaging SkyDrive mounted as a drive on your PC!

Really, that’s a great thing. If you able to mount SkyDrive on your PC as a drive then you will no longer to find that special folder. You can access SkyDrive straight away from My Computer with few click.

So how to do this

For this purpose you need to download a software named as Folder Drive. Folder drive is a small utility which lets you mount/unmounts the folders as drives on your PC. Just you have to download, run, select folders, assign drive and then simply hit create drive. That’s all.

To mount SkyDrive as a drive in your PC, open the software, then select your SkyDrive folder (which is created by SkyDrive app) and the assign a letter of your choice. After that click on Create Drive button.

sd1

Now open My Computer from desktop or Start menu and you will see the a new drive in your PC. That’s the SkyDrive. Now you can rename that drive to SkyDrive as shown in following screenshot. Here I have used ‘W’ as my drive letter. You can select any of your choice. Now you can interact with SkyDrive more efficiently.

sd2

Since we have mounted the folder as drive, content in both folder and drive will be same always and will be synced to cloud automatically. You can use this trick with Google Drive and Dropbox also or even for deep located folder which contains data that you need frequently.

According to the publisher website Folder Drive works on 95/98/2000/XP and vista. But we tested it on Windows 7 64bit version and found to be working. You can try it on your PC. For more option you can use option button on Folder Drive app.

Note: The mounted folder are valid for current session only. That means if you restart your PC then you need to remount all folders again. You can change this option as your requirement from option menu.

You can download Folder Drive software for free from here or you can click here for direct download.

Folder Drive For Windows

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.