I'd like to start by saying I've been using DrivePool+Scanner for a while now, and they are seriously awesome. Everything WHS should have been. So much thanks for that.
I only use it for home use but the one thing I'm currently lacking is an offsite backup. That's where CloudDrive comes into play for me. Being able to use multiple cloud providers with DrivePool is really powerful. Before now I wouldn't have considered it as I don't want to trust the cloud with my private files, but the encryption part of CloudDrive fixes that.
So basically my use case is to pool as many providers as possible, and backup only the most essential data. Speed isn't important to me.
On to my first experience. I installed CloudDrive and hooked up dropbox, amazon and hit a wall with microsoft onedrive. I eventually found the forum post (grateful it was stickied) and enabled it. I realise that their service is poop, but would be nice to be able to enable in the UI with appropriate warnings.
I put about 10mb of test data in all of the providers and found that they all generated lots of errors and didn't seem to get anything uploaded. Eventually worked out by reading through the forums that it's probably because my connection isn't fast enough (8mbit down, <1mbit up). After massively increasing most of the timeouts, reducing the threads to 1 and destroying/re-creating the drives with 128k chunks instead of the default 1mb I managed to get it stable.
What would be cool is if you had a benchmarking feature in the app, a bit like scanner's burst test. Then you could potentially have an "autodetect" settings feature, as finding and editing a config isn't the most user friendly first experience. You could also warn the user that their connection is less than optimal.
The only other thing I messed up was that I assumed that CloudDrive was encrypted by default. Would I be right in thinking that with encryption unticked, the chunks in the cloud would be readable somehow? I couldn't find a way to enable encryption on my cloud drives after I had made them, so in the end deleted them and created them again.
It would definitely be cool to have an overview panel of all of the connected drives. At the moment you have to hop through all the tabs to see what, if anything, is going on.
Anyway hope this feedback is helpful, keep up the fantastic work.
Max got a reaction from Christopher (Drashna) in First impressions