You have 100% Dropbox. Or “Yandex.Disk”. Or even “Mail.ru Cloud”.
They all store in the cloud what you already have on your computer.

This is good for:

• file backup
• sharing with other people
• synchronization between multiple computers
• or access your data from the tablet, for example

But sometimes you do not need to have on your computer a copy of what is in the cloud. I always wanted to have extra space in the cloud in order to dump there irrelevant, but which may be needed in the future. That would be a vault so a vault. I tried to do it.

Under the cut two failed attempts and one super-successful.

Attempt 1. WebDav

I remember how Yandex.Disk didn’t openly offer a WebDav interface to its cloud. It was encouraging. But it turned out to be completely impossible to use in practice. Just listing files in a folder could take a few minutes. And if something else is being downloaded in parallel ... In short, it turned out to be not an option at all.

Attempt 2. Through the web

I tried not to install the cloud storage client, but to use the web interface. It basically worked, although it was inconvenient. But the files, count, remained buried there forever. Walking through the web and downloading one at a time is a chore. Synchronize the entire archive on the working disk for several files, too, you will not. I completely lost hope. But a couple of months ago, I stumbled upon Odrive.

Overdrive

I do not know what the creators think, but their program is free , despite the fact that they have two completely deadly features:

• Multiple storage support
• Unsync

Feature # 1 Lots of Clouds

You can pick up several cloud storages to their client, they will all be synchronized in both directions and lie on your computer just in different daddies. Yes, Yandex.Disk can also pick up. Yes, and two dropboxes too. And three.

Here is a picture with an incomplete list of connected storages:

Feature # 2 Unsync

Imagine that you just mounted a gigabyte movie on 5.

Next step: wait until it synchronizes to the “conditional dropbox” and press Unsync. Instead of your file there is a “shortcut” - a file of zero size. By clicking it will start downloading from the cloud to your computer again. It works with folders.

The problem of WebDav with folder navigation is solved once - you just leave the structure of frequently used directories on your computer, and the files are made by Unsync.

In this place it would be possible to leave you alone, but this is not the end of the story.

In the list of supported Odrive repositories, I came across an Amazon Personal Cloud with an unlimited size of $ 60 per year. That is for $ 5 per month. It is two times cheaper than a terabyte from the dropbox:

Read carefully further. Because there is a chance that together with the client you will want to throw away your cloud storage.

Synergy drive + Amazon Private Cloud

Synergy is when the summing effect of the interaction of two pieces significantly exceeds the effect of each individual piece in the form of their simple sum.

With a pair of Odrive + Amazon Private Cloud, this is exactly what happens.

It seems that Amazon, offering an unlimited storage size, still counts on the final size of our hard drives. But with unsync this ceases to be a limitation. So we can really fill in there indefinitely !

Lean back in a chair for a moment and fantasize, I'll wait.

My experience of using

No, I did not upload petabytes of data to Amazon. I just violated the configuration of my dream, when everything big, but necessary, lies in the cloud and at the same time at hand.

I also began to gradually transfer archives from an external terabyte disk to Amazon. Little by little, because the bottleneck here is the size of the disk on the computer (I have a macbook with 128 GB disk) and the speed of your internet access to upload.

Minor troubles:

• If you refuse native storage clients, you will not be able to use the features of sharing data from the operating system interface.

  
  
• Odrive does not know what to do with symlinks. Totally. So the symlinks will always hang with the status “Not allowed” until you delete them. That is, the whole system you are unlikely to cram into Amazon through Odrive.

And amenities:

• Odrive has its own simple folder / file sharing in the form of a web page.

  
  

• For a couple of months using Odrive, I still haven't managed to lose data, although there was such a fear.

  
  
• Amazon to give you a lift gives three months for free, so they haven't even taken a penny from me yet.

Total:

Odrive especially deserves your attention if

• you already have more than one cloud

Amazon Personal Cloud + Odrive deserves your attention if

• you have a small hard drive, and you want to keep a lot of things in the cloud.

Odrive & 1Activity

I like to experiment with different approaches to workflow organization, and as a result of this experiment, the 1Activity program was born, which perfectly complements the effect of Odrive.