Confused on the use case of CloudDrive

[phdeoliveira]

I'm a new StableBit user. I've been pretty pleased with the ability to combine multiple drives on windows. I digress. 

I'm looking at CloudDrive and I am trying to understand it's limitations. To my understanding you're able to upload your data in StableBit to whatever provider you chose? Basically a cloud backup of your data?

I was curious if I could do the other way around? I basically want my Dropbox Data to be synced/stored locally? Since I can't mount Dropbox to a StableBit drive, I thought I could do something similar with CloudDrive?

Help me understand, thanks!

 

 

[Shane]

The short of it is that CloudDrive allows you to designate a supported storage provider (e.g. dropbox, a network share, even a local drive) and 'format' a specified amount of space in it to present that space as a cloud-based drive to Windows.

If you're familiar at all with mounting disk image files over a network share (using tools like VirtualBox, HyperV, etc) that's basically what CloudDrive lets you do except the "image file" is a folder full of block files kept in your cloud account.

E.g. if you had a Dropbox account and you reserved 1TB of space as a CloudDrive drive, Windows would see a SCSI drive of that size in File Explorer.

Pro: you can treat your cloud storage just like it's a physical drive on your computer, and you can do things like encrypt it locally so it can't be read by anyone in the cloud without the password you set in CloudDrive.

Con: just like a physical drive, it can only be "plugged into" and readable from one computer at any given time (unless you have a way to share it out - just like a physical drive).

As far as syncing/storing Dropbox files locally, you could use a CloudDrive drive as a drive in a DrivePool pool and mirror via duplication or you could use a tool such as FreeFileSync or SyncThing to mirror between your dropbox folder and your pool drive. There are technical pros and cons to either approach.

If you just want to mount your entire Dropbox as a network drive (basically just give it a drive letter instead of being a folder) there are other third-party apps that can do that.