Shade Cloud
The shade cloud is designed to be the fastest way to get up and running with Shade. It is also implemented for those who may not already have any existing NAS or storage infrastructure or for people who want consistent uptime for all of their assets no matter where they go and want to minimize latency and downloading everywhere.
What really is the Shade Cloud?
The Shade Cloud is our own hosted version of the Shade Drives (for more information about drives, see more about them here). In the cloud, you get your own managed drive and your own storage location. This means all the management of storage, access, reading and more is handled for you. We also take additional precautions to make sure that your data is properly backed up and protected (please see more details on our storage infrastructure and providers) .
💡 Shade by default stores your data in a specific region that is closest to where you create your account. Users have the option to “replicate” data to different regions for faster latency, however this does incur storage cost per region.
You get all the capabilities of running Shade and drives without having to manage all of the infrastructure required. You pay for storage + the management of that storage with Shade.
Creating Your Cloud Drives
To get started - head to the Sidebar > My Drives > Create a New Drive.
When should you not use Shade Cloud
There are a few cases where it doesn’t make sense to use the Shade Cloud that are worth heeding and considering.
When you have all your assets on your computer (individual only)
Shade works in the cloud, and if you are an individual with all of your assets locally, it might not make sense to use the cloud. However, if you're looking to have a backup of your assets, or if you are looking to have a consistent search experience across all of your assets, then it might make sense to use the cloud especially if you need access to your assets from multiple locations.
Choosing between Cloud and Self-Hosted
For those that have a hybrid workflow and have multiple locations, Shade is a prime use case of unifying your data siloes. Where traditionally you would have needed to use multiple different applications to manage your cloud and your self-hosted data, you can now have one pane of view to search, access, and share all of your data no matter where that data is located.
There are still a few things we’d recommend to determine how you’d like to manage your data.
High-Sharing Situations Should Use the Cloud
Shade’s technology is still limited by you and your internet speed and the distance between our servers, and the destination. Although we are working on improving our caching mechanisms and implementing an edge network, latency is still an issue that can cause slowdowns throughout the Shade real-time file system and the application itself. As a result - we highly recommend that if you are working remotely with team members across regions or countries to use the Shade Cloud as your basis of collaborative work.
Use Shade Cloud if you want fast AI experiences
Because we are able to leverage the full capability of our cloud (including GPU based compute and additional AI models) - we are able to offer faster indexing and richer metadata for cloud drives.