We can start using the MultCloud web application without signing up. This is certainly a nice feature, but we recommend it only for browsing the site and not for connecting your accounts. Thus, we go with the normal Sign up process. Once we verify our email address, we are able to start using the site.
We were not able to find a link to Privacy Policy at the main page. But, once we logged in, at the bottom of the screen, we found a link to “Security”. According to that, MultCloud will not save the passwords for our cloud accounts, and it will not store our files on its server. This is definitely good news, but, they do not inform us how they store the tokens that they get from a cloud service. Do they encrypt them? if Yes, how? If not, who else can access their database.
This is the welcome screen, and it depicts that our free version will not stay free for ever. It all depends on the size of the files that we transfer per month, but, in the free version we can upload files with total size of 50GB.
Easy of use
We had no issues to connect to Dropbox and OneDrive accounts. We also found that it is possible to add more than one account from the same cloud service.
Browsing
The screen is split in two: The left panel contains the list of connected accounts, and the right panel has the list of items in the selected account.
Right click on an account in the left panel will bring up a menu with actions to “Rename” and “Remove” that account. The “Edit” action acts like the “Add Cloud Drive”. The “Properties” action displays a few info about that account, and the available storage.
The browsing of an account is a little bit strange, and out of ordinary. When we clicked on an account, we saw our folders on the right panel. Clicking on them did not do anything. Right click on them, brought up a menu, which has a large list of actions, but, none of them seems to work. The same holds for files. We use Firefox for browsing.
Apparently that issue is only present on the Firefox browser. We logged in to MultCloud page from Safari, Opera and Chrome, and all of them worked as we expected them to work. Still, they should fix these issues on the Firefox browser
We can browse an account by clicking on the blue down arrow, on the left panel. That arrow is not always present, and we need to click on the account for it to appear. But, once we click on it, it will stay there through out the entire session
When we click on it we see the list of our folders. Click on it again to dismiss that list. Each folder in that list has an arrow on the left end, and when we click on it we see the folders that are contained in that folder. If we click on a folder, we see its contents in the right panel.
Transferring
We can transfer a file / folder by dragging & dropping it in a folder. To initiate the drag process we need to left click and hold the mouse down on the name of the folder/file. Then we release it above the folder that we want that item to be transferred to. If we want to transfer more than one items (folders or files or mixed), we check the checkbox that is on the left side of each of them, and we then drag&drop them in the selected folder. The entire cloud transfer process was slow, but there was a progress bar indicating the progress.
In order to upload a local file we click on the “Upload” button. This is located at the top left corner of the right panel. As before, we add files by dragging & dropping them in the designated area. The files are uploaded by clicking on the “Upload” button. Note, that these files are uploaded in the folder that is highlighted in the left panel. If the account is highlighted, then they will be uploaded in the root folder
Due to the issues that we had with the Firefox browser, we switched to Chrome. There we were able to browse a folder by right clicking on it and selecting the “Open” action. All other actions that are displayed in screenshot “Folder actions” work. What was interesting is that we were able to copy a folder in the same folder that it is located. We did not get any error message for that action, but instead, the second version of the folder was renamed. Nice feature to alleviate the need to manually check for conflicts.
Sharing
Finally, we can share a folder / file by clicking on the corresponding action. Next we are asked to choose the type of link: public (anyone that is aware of the link can access the files), private (need to enter the password), and source link (the folder/file is shared using the API of the cloud provider). The last choice is not available to all cloud services
Efficiency
The efficiency greatly depends upon the ease of use, and Multcloud needs to do a better job here. Our main concern is that it does not operate as it should on all browsers. Also, MultCloud does not have a desktop nor a mobile version. It is purely a web application!
Nonetheless, it has a large selection of supported cloud services:
- Adrive
- Alfresco
- Amazon Drive
- Amazon S3
- Backblaze
- Baidu
- Box
- Cloudme
- Cubby
- Dropbox
- Egnyte
- Evernote
- Google Drive
- HiDrive
- Hubic
- MediaFire
- MEGA
- MyDrive
- OneDrive
- ownCloud
- pCloud
- Putio
- SugarSync
- WebDav
- WEB.DE
- Yandex
Cost
In the free version we can transfer (or sync) files with a total size of 50GB per month. If we exceed this limit we need to upgrade to one of the paid plans, e.g. 150GB / month for $9.9. We believe that you will soon exceed this free limit if you connect to more than 2 accounts. Unless, you are interested in browsing your files.
I am using Multcloud for last two months it was an amazing experience.