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There is no OneDrive Provider?


Christopher (Drashna)

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In case you are wondering why we have chosen to not include a cloud provider for OneDrive, there is a very good reason for this.

 

Namely, the service is heavily throttled, which makes it nigh unusable for CloudDrive. 

Additionally, I beleive that we have had stability issues with their API (Alex will have to confirm that). 

 

Because of this, we have elected to not include OneDrive support at this time.

At such a time that they lift the bandwidth limits, we will re-assess this.

 

 

We do allow the option to enable the provider, by using the advanced settings, if you are very curious.

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_CloudDrive_Advanced_Settings#ProviderRegistry

 

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Christopher - Thank you for the post about OneDrive and the reasons.

 

For my use case I was hoping to use CloudDrive for only a fully encrypted way to put a "BACKUP ONLY" mirror of folders into my mostly unused 1TB MS OneDrive account.  Bandwidth doesn't matter as I will only be sending up Mirror duplicates for backup storage and only retreiving if an issue occurs.

 

Not something that will be accessed by any programs.

 

Most important question would be: If I enable OneDrive via the registry will it continue to be available with updates out of the Beta?  Maybe into the GUI settings with a bouch of warnings / prompts?

 

Can you see a way of doing this on a WHS2011 with DrivePool installed and Stablebit_Scanner installed.  Should the CloudDrive to OneDrive be setup outside the DrivePool and use TaskManager to run RoboCopy batch file to do MIR of the server shares on the DrivePool?

 

Or combine CloudDrive into DrivePool?  But it'd be sweet to have a DrivePool Add-in for CloudDrive to easily say: "Pooled CloudDrive = Duplicated Only and force a full duplicate onto the CloudDrive without messing up the # of duplicates on Local"

 

Ideally I could have a share folder in DrivePool be set to 2 or 3 duplicates.  Then also say CloudDrive an additional duplicate (as a backup) for that folder or by the share.

 

At the moment I'm thinking keeping the CloudDrive out of the Pool and doing RoboCopy is the way I'd like to go.  Keeps things working for how I want to use the offsite backup.

 

EDIT: 

Second most important question: Do you think enabling OneDrive and using CloudDrive but only having the OS do copy/moves via RoboCopy (with a high # of retries (/r) and  waits (/w) and /z for startup where last stopped options through the CloudDrive and the throttled OneDrive will work?  Or will CloudDrive be so upset with the throttling that the RoboCopy will just fail.  NOTE: I excpet it to taking days and days being so slow for the initial upload.

 

If it really looks broken (API stability) etc... I might have to consider setting up a new provider that you fully support.

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Once you've enabled the ProviderRegistry setting, it will show the OneDrive and any other "experimental" providers (it's the only one, ATM, IIRC).  I don't think we plan on removing it, but we'll post here if we do.

And it should receive updates, if there are any (we don't expect there to be so, unless Microsoft makes a significant change to OneDrive).

 

 

As for "outside of the pool", well we use raw blocks of data (think "sectors" on the disk), so there isn't a way to import data to the CloudDrive (like there is with StableBit DrivePool). Sorry. 

Though, there may be ways around this... I'll have to investigate/confer with Alex about that.

 

 

As for integration with DrivePool, you can already add the CloudDrive to a pool!

And in fact, the "File Placement Rules" were a hugely important "pre-release" feature for CloudDrive (just think about that for a moment :) ).

And you can use the built in "Disk Usage Limiter" to only place duplicated files on the CloudDrive disk, actually. 

 

So, there was definitely some planning for the StableBit CloudDrive product with StableBit DrivePool!

 

 

 

As for RoboCopy, you shouldn't need to do that.

Depending on how much data you need to place on the CloudDrive... Well, set the Cache size to be at least that size when you create the initial drive.

The cache stores all the files locally when you write the data. It then uploads that data as quickly as it can, based on your settings (these settings can get very complicated, though).  
The cache is also used when reading files (to prefetch reads, specifically). 

 

 

So as long as you have a large cache, you shouldn't see any issues on your end. It just make take forever to upload everything. Even with 20+mbps upload speed.

 

 

 

As for Alternative providers, DropBox offers 1TB for $9.95/month and Amazon CloudDrive offers unlimited storage for $59.95/year. Both work very well. But Amazon CloudDrive does have some issues (you'll see a lot of retries, and we have "verification" enabled by default which uses a LOT more bandwidth). 

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Humm.... From my point of view I only really want software that can do the complete secure encrypted trust no one part.  Honestly the smallest cache possible would be best as well the files are already on the same computer and I only want a backup (and if needed retrieve from backup) tool.  That's why I'd like to use RoboCopy.  Unless you have a way of saying this DrivePool Folder needs to be backed-up to this CloudDrive (as an encrypted backup) and I've missed it somewhere?

 

I know CloudDrive is designed for so much more and I get that.  Unfortunately I'm only looking for very sold/robust encrypted backup that is "off-site" in the cloud.

 

If CouldDrive had a way to being setup in this mode (by tweaking features/settings) I'd pay for it for sure.  You have my trust for my files and would prefer to have such a tool from you than anywhere else.

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Beaker,

 

Just to clarify, the encryption for CloudDrive is done as SOON as it hits the driver. That means that even the local cache is actually encrypted.

http://blog.covecube.com/2015/05/introducing-stablebit-clouddrive/

 

StableBit CloudDrive’s full drive encryption doesn’t only encrypt your data in the cloud, it also makes sure that any data stored locally in the on-disk cache is encrypted as well.

In fact, StableBit CloudDrive encrypts your data as soon as it’s written to the cloud drive and decrypts it only when it’s read, offering full round trip encryption. This means that at no point is your encrypted data written to disk in an unencrypted form, either locally or in the cloud.

At no point is it not encrypted, basically.

 

 

As for the file location:

File Placement rules allow you to specify which folders, or even files end up on which drive.  This feature was actually developed SPECIFICALLY with StableBit CloudDrive in mind.

http://blog.covecube.com/2014/05/stablebit-drivepool-2-1-0-553-rc-file-placement-and-product-3/

(StableBit CloudDrive is the "Product 3" mentioned, in fact).

However, this post goes over the feature more.

http://blog.covecube.com/2014/04/stablebit-drivepool-2-1-0-503-beta-per-folder-balancing/

 

 

And if you set the file placement rules to only place the specific files on the CloudDrive part, and set the duplication level to 2x or higher, the duplicates will be placed on any other disk in the pool (as it cannot find a suitable drive, as per the file placement rules). 

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I think MANY people would be interested in a way to leverage OneDrive storage especially as you get 10TB (or unlimited if you reach the 10TB limit and request more) as part of their Office 365 subscription.

 

Similarly, I would be happy to use this as an offsite back-up and still keep 2x copies of my files on local server disks, so really the need for fast performance from the offsite back-up is limited.

 

I understand that I would not be able to use this in a conventional sense like a drive, but maybe there could be that option for "cold" storage - a bit like Amazon Glacier where you don't expect to have great performance for retrieval - its more of a worst case scenario is you lose your entire server (inc. duplication) e.g. in a fire as opposed to losing 1 drive and having to rebuild the lost duplicated files.

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I think MANY people would be interested in a way to leverage OneDrive storage especially as you get 10TB (or unlimited if you reach the 10TB limit and request more) as part of their Office 365 subscription.

We absolutely agree.  However, when we say that it's throttled badly, I mean that it's throttled REALLY REALLY badly, and actually causes issues with how StableBit CloudDrive works so that it's not reliably enough.

 

And ... if it takes you a year or more to fill up that 10TBs even with a good upload speed (lets say 20mbps) .... is it really worth it? That said, we do offer the ability to use OneDrive as a Cloud Provider, but only as an experimental one.

 

And we're not the only ones that have noticed just how slow OneDrive is, either. I've seen mention of cloud to cloud services mentioning this as well (and they're on super high end fiber, getting many GB/s speeds, in theory). 

 

However, if Microsoft fixes the throttling issues, then we will happily and eagerly enable the OneDrive provider by default. 

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As for Amazon Glacier, it's S3 oriented to cold storage. 

However, because CloudDrive uses the disk as a ... well, a normal disk, you could see a lot of activity on the drive. And this could cause issues (from a billing standpoint, as Glacier penalizes you for a lot of traffic). 

 

As a cold storage solution, it may work rather well though.  

 

Nope, Amazon Glacier appears to use a different API for S3

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We're definitely using the new API.

However, in regards to throttling, but API's seem to be throttled.

 

And i you want to see just how badly, check out the dev site:

https://dev.onedrive.com/README.htm

Check the bottom part out, where it says "Throttling".

It delays you for 3600 seconds (one hour)! That's..... horrendous. 

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