Google Drive Existing Files

[Hurricane Hunia]

Hey guys I need some help.

I have a drobo that has developed issues on me and is currently being assessed. I migrated all my files (8TB) to google drive and Im considering using cloud drive and drive pool to change my setup.

What I want to do is use my drobo to act as a local cache and my google drive as a cloud drive, to have a range of local and remote files with some parity for my important files.

What I want to know is can I void having to download my 8TB of files locally before having to migrate to the new cloud drive and re-upload to google drive?

[srcrist]

Unfortunately, because of the way CloudDrive operates, you'll have to download the data and reupload it again to use CloudDrive. 

CloudDrive is a block-based solution that creates an actual drive image, chops it up into chunks, and stores those chunks on your cloud provider. CloudDrive's data is not accessible directly from the provider--by design. The reverse of this is that CloudDrive also cannot access data that you already have on your provider, because it isn't stored in the format that CloudDrive requires. 

There are other solutions, including Google's own Google File Stream application, that can mount your cloud storage and make it directly accessible as a drive on your PC. Other similar tools are rClone, ocaml-fuse, NetDrive, etc. There are pros and cons to both approaches. I'll list some below to help you make an informed decision: 

Block-based Pros:

• A block-based solution creates a *real* drive (as far as Windows is concerned). It can be partitioned like a physical drive, you can use file-system tools like chkdsk to preserve the data integrity, and literally any program that can access any other drive in your PC works natively without any hiccups. You can even use tools like DrivePool or Storage Spaces to combine multiple CloudDrive drives or volumes into one larger pool. 
• A block-based solution enables end to end encryption. An encrypted drive is completely obfuscated both from your provider and anyone who might access your data by hacking your provider's services. Not even the number of files, let alone the file names, is visible unless the drive is mounted. CloudDrive has built-in encryption that encrypts the data before it is even written to your local disk. 
• A block-based solution also enables more sophisticated sorts of data manipulation as well. Consider the ability to access parts of files without first downloading the entire file. That sort of thing. The ability to cache sections of data locally also falls under this category, which can greatly reduce API calls to your provider.

Block-based Cons:

• Data is obfuscated even if unencrypted, and unable to be accessed directly from the provider. We already discussed this above, but it's definitely one of the negatives--depending on your use case. The only thing that you'll see on your provider is thousands of chunks of a few dozen megabytes of size.
• The drive is inaccessible in any way unless mounted by the drivers that decrypt the data and provide it to the operating system. You'll be tethered to CloudDrive for as long as you keep the data on the cloud. Moving the data outside of that ecosystem would require it to again be downloaded and reuploaded in its native format.

Hope that helps. 

[Hurricane Hunia]

Thanks for your reply I appreciate it, I was expecting that answer but its always best to ask.

I really like the idea of clouddrive and drivepool working together with my drobo and google apps, it will be worth the effort I think.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

On 10/24/2018 at 4:43 AM, srcrist said:

• A block-based solution enables end to end encryption. An encrypted drive is completely obfuscated both from your provider and anyone who might access your data by hacking your provider's services. Not even the number of files, let alone the file names, is visible unless the drive is mounted. CloudDrive has built-in encryption that encrypts the data before it is even written to your local disk. 

Another fun fact:  Your bandwidth usage (without looking at the data transmitted) can be used to identity the type of activity.  And a shady ISP could throttle you based on that info.  

Because StableBit CloudDrive uses uniform blocks of data (mostly), this sort of network detection may not work at all. Especially if you set the "minimum download size".