With cloud storage becoming a part of our computing, services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Windows SkyDrive etc. are becoming increasingly popular. They keep our data on their cloud servers which can be accessed anytime using Internet from any operating system or device (phone, tablet or any other computing device) supported by the cloud service, and most of these services have dedicated web-interface, so any device which is not directly supported can anyways access the files using a web-browser. I very often use Dropbox to store all my important files which I require at home and at work or to keep files which I want to keep safe even if my computer fails, it works really well.
How would you like if the cloud folder (a dropbox or Google Drive folder or a Skydrive folder) is present as a hard drive in your computer? We have something which can do that for you by creating a virtual drive in Windows for you for each of these cloud folders on your Windows PC. While it does not change the world for a computer user, but it does offer a convenience to directly open the drive and store stuff in the drive as you have the entire clouds folder as a hard disk (or hard disk partition) mounted on your computer which gets automatically synchronized to your cloud servers when you store anything on these drives. You can also do a network location mapping of these drives which is slightly complicated and slow. In this article, I will share a different approach using a freeware software called the Visual Subst which lets you create Virtual drives out of any folder.
Simply download and install the Visual Subst and half of the work is done, rest half, I share in few simple steps below:
Step 1: After installing the Virtual Subst software, simply open the software. On the screen, browser through the folder or folder path for Google Drive or Dropbox Drive etc. on your computer, select a drive letter and click the green add button. This will add the selected folder at selected virtual drive with the drive letter you select.
Step 2: Repeat the above step for all the cloud folders you want to add, In this demo I have added Google Drive at Drive letter R and Dropbox at Drive letter S. Do check the checkbox at the bottom on the window if you want these virtual drives to remain after you restart your Windows computer.
This is it, just two simple steps and you can add your desired cloud folders to virtual drive letters but they do show up in Windows Explorer or My Computer section. On disadvantage though is that you can not rename the virtual drive labels as they will remain the same as the hard disk where these folders are located.
I hope you found this small tip useful and handy, do share it with your friends and help them use the cloud storage services more conveniently.
via – Ghacks