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Cloud disk space that acts/behaves/appears as local
asterisk14a
Member
I got myself a lenovo 100s which has a 32GB eMMC drive. It's a windows version of a cloudbook I suppose with a 32GB 'hard disk'. This is now full.
I was wondering if anyone knows of software that acts as cloud storage but does not save the file locally, but appears as a local file and when you click on it, it downloads it. So it's kind of like dropbox, but it doesn't ALSO maintain the files locally, as I do no have the space for this!!
I want to put it into a 'dropbox' like folder, it's uplaoded to the cloud, then it is (or I can) deleted from the local storage and stored in the cloud. However there is an icon in the local drive that points to the file and if I click it it downloads the file for use. (I guess this is a type of mapped network drive?)
If anyone knows of software or a website offering this or how to set this type of thing up with existing cloud services, please let me know.
Thanks
Comments
use samba and mount to your windows, or owncloud with webdav.
We're using samba in our office.
If you got a Linux VPS you can use SSHFS (Windows client available) to access remote files over SSH and it will act as a network drive.
You can also try pCloud cloud storage. AFAIR their Windows client works that way and they give a good amount of free GBs with no file size limit
Expandrive can do this, Stablebit were also working on a solution for this.
Pcloud ?
I believe you can do this with Windows 8.1 or newer using live drive. It lets you not keep the folder in sync.
http://www.howtogeek.com/199099/save-drive-space-by-offloading-local-files-to-the-cloud/
http://infinit.sh/ works quite well if you want your own storage with cloud providers.
I'd be interested in your setup, as with 3 way replication mine runs like a dog as soon as you throw a folder with 5K+ files in at it.
Samba with its underlying CIFS protocol is your best bet to have remote storage behave in a truly transparent local-like manner. Basically it is the same protocol which handles the "mapped network drives" you mentioned. Second option is NFS, but really, today for a regular user it's nothing but a crappier work-alike to Samba, with worse fault tolerances and little to no authentication. Neither will work too great on a high ping connections though, but really, there are limits to what can be done, you can't expect much if your storage is thousands of kilometers away.
As for other options, especially avoid anything based on WebDAV, mentioning "object storage", or in fact any "cloud" storage providers whatsoever. All of those will have to download files entirely before you can access it, and upload the whole file back if even one byte is modified.
SSHFS probably could work, but still it's going to have rather mediocre latency and throughput compared to Samba.
The native Windows iSCSI initiator is a good option for the OP requirements, but the connection to the server must be fast and stable.
Thanks guys, odrive, netdrive and pcloud are serious contenders which I am trying out.
cPanel has this built in... you can map it as a network drive in Windows