More accurately, Gladinet Tech Support can’t fix a three-month-old issue that completely breaks Gladinet Cloud Backup’s reliability as a backup tool when using Amazon Cloud Drive.
The root issue is simple: your Amazon Cloud Drive login credential expire after 48 hours. After that, you or any services that access your Cloud Drive account have to log in again. Gladinet apparently didn’t realize that when they added Amazon Cloud Drive as an option.
So if you leave your computer running, your Gladinet scheduled backups will work for two days & then start failing. Not only will they fail, but there is no active notification that they are failing … a worst-case backup scenario.
Gladinet support acknowledged the problem immediately, which is the one single good thing I’ll say about them. The downward trend toward awful customer service started one month later, when I checked in & this was their response:
Sorry there is no update yet. And right now we don’t have an ETA either. We constantly exam all the open bugs. However, sometimes there are other more urgent to fix first. For now, please restart Gladinet within couple of days.
You’d think this bug would be pretty urgent, right? At least urgent enough to fix over several months. Or should I really be content knowing that apparently there are many more urgent bugs that need fixing?
Having the same problem? Follow my support forum topic here. Here’s another post about the same issue by another user from September 29, 2011.
To make matters slightly worse, the Gladinet Support forum search has been broken for several months as well. But they’ve been busy fixing more urgent website bugs, no doubt.
Carl Jenkins
Had the same issue. Gladinet where awful. I swapped to SMEStorage – so far so good.
Aaron
I’ve used Gladinet for 3 years now. The software works well with SkyDrive and Google, but breaks with Amazon.
I’ve experience the same issue as Wick since the addition of Amazon to Gladinet cloud storage lineup. Seeing as this is a core function of the software it is effectively useless without it.
Kinda feeling like a wanker for laying out money for a broken product.
I’ll look into SMEStorage.
Josh
Seems like a reasonable response from them to me. What control do they have over amazon’s login policy that you think they can somehow change this? The only option would be for them to store your login info somewhere and automatically log you in every 48 hours. But then you would be B*@#ing and moaning about the horrible privacy issues (“Dey took err logins!!!!”, “Dey terk der de der!”).
Wick
At least get your facts straight if you’re going to be an ass. Gladinet stores your Amazon login credentials, permanently. Restart Gladinet — or knock yourself out, restart your computer — for 48 hours, Gladinet Amazon backups work again. You never have to enter your Amazon credentials after the initial account setup. It’s fucked up programming.
In fact it’s a worst-case backup scenario there’s no active notification the backups shit the bed. The cardinal rule of backups. Another fail.
Ed
Actually Amazon has requested that Gladinet remove Cloud Drive support completely starting with V4. You can still get Cloud Drive access by installing V3 first, map your AZ drive and then run the V4 upgrade. This will maintain the mapping……however…I have noticed that if you don’t have any file activity on your AZ drive for 30 days, you either have to use the Gladinet “Force Relogin” or remap the account, which can’t be done in V4. You essentially would have to start over back at V3, repeat and rinse.
This was Amazon’s goal to begin with, is to force people to use their client software to sync/copy files, not some webdav integration tool they don’t support.
While I still use Gladinet, it worked OK with AZ drive, but I can’t say the upload performance was all that stellar. With AZ forcing the relogin if I wasn’t sending anything to them regularly, I finally cried uncle and dropped them from my Gladinet client.
As noted in the comments, there are OTHER ways to access AZ cloud w/o all the silliness.