kingston drive
The Kingston DataTraveler Locker + G3 has CloudKey built in. Photo via Kingston

You’re already backing up your computer — right?— but what about your portable drives? CloudKey from ClevX makes it easy to back up USB drives and other portable to the cloud-storage service of your choice.

The key to a good backup system is actually backing things up. After initial installation on your USB drive, CloudKey runs automatically every time you plug your drive into an Internet-connected computer, keeping a backup of your portable drive in a folder on your preferred cloud storage service. Dropbox, Box, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are all supported.

datatraveler_locker_g3_16gb_usbtocloud_dtlpg3_16gb_s_usb-cloud_hr_29_01_2015_15_35ClevX is a Kirkland, Wash.-based company founded in 2005 by inventor and entrepreneur Lev Bolotin, who was previously an executive with Data I/O Corp. The company’s name stands for “Clever Extensions.” ClevX has developed and patented a variety of mobile, data and other technologies that it offers under intellectual property licenses.

CloudKey is a subscription service. If you want to use CloudKey on your own device, plans start at just under $10 per year for one drive. There’s no size limit to the drive, so that means you can use USBCloud to keep a 4GB thumb drive or a 512GB SSD external drive backed up and synced to the cloud. You can also install it on an SD card to quickly back up photos.

As an alternative to paying for the subscription, check out Kingston’s DataTraveler Locker + G3 drive. ClevX has extended its partnership with Kingston to integrate CloudKey on this line of secure drives, where the service is branded as “USB to Cloud.” Kingston’s DataTraveler Locker + G3 comes in four sizes up to 64GB and includes five years of CloudKey backup.

Using CloudKey

After installing CloudKey on your drive, you launch the application from the drive to choose your cloud. Then you authorize the app to access to your account. A folder is created in your cloud to stores all the stuff you store on your drive.

dialog1_step1When you add something to your USB drive and your computer is connected to the Internet, CloudKey automatically syncs the file to that folder. You can also use the settings to exclude specific files and folders from the automatic backup.

CloudKey is especially nice for smaller drives with limited storage. You can add a file to an 8GB drive and once it’s synced to the cloud, you can remove the file from the drive and it’ll still be in your cloud.

While paying an additional fee to backup another device to the cloud is a bit of a bummer, paying less than $1 per month might be worth the convenience, especially for the less tech-savvy among us. Consider installing it on your kids’ portable drives, so if the drives get lost or mangled, your kids will have a backup of their school work. Or you can install CloudKey on your mom’s camera card to easily share photos with the family.

Another (temporary) downside: you’re currently limited to Windows systems for the automatic syncing (although you can still use the drive on a Mac and the sync will run when reconnected to a Windows machine). A Mac app is in beta right now and should be out this summer.

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