How to Combine 42GB of Free Storage from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive

“Free Cloud Storage” is everywhere and who doesn’t like free! Box, Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft all offer tons of free storage. But every one of those companies has a plan to get you hooked so you eventually PAY for more. For some of us, cloud storage isn’t a justifiable cost. And some of us just enjoy the taste of Free-dom. So, if you have an email account, you can easily get 42 GBs of free storage in less than 5 minutes.

odrive is available for both Mac and Windows!

If you’re like me, you probably use one or all of those services already and you know it can be a PITA to use all your different accounts together. You’ve got to use the web to access your files (and have a ridiculously messy “Downloads” folder). If you want desktop access, you’ve got to download 4 different applications that sync everything you put in the cloud, directly to your computer. And those applications don’t play very nicely together when running them at the same time (at least that’s what my CPU tells me).

Fear not! There is finally a way to get the most out of COMPLETELY FREE storage.

odrive is the best way to utilize all your free storage seamlessly

odrive is your folder to everything you already use online. For you quick-to-judge haters out there, we’ll start with what it isn’t. odrive isn’t cloud storage. We don’t store (or want) your data, your files, or even your passwords. With odrive, you are connecting directly to your storage so your data does not go through us. Trust me, we don’t want your confidential files, your #selfies, or photos of your unmentionables. We just want to make your life easier!

odrive lets you connect directly to all your disparate storage apps and brings them all to you in a single desktop folder. What’s more is that odrive allows you to connect to multiple accounts on the same storage platform. Personally, I have 2 Dropbox accounts, 2 Gmail/Google Drive accounts, 1 Box, and 1 OneDrive account (not to mention 1 Facebook and 1 Instagram account).

I want my 42GBs of Free Storage!

To get your free storage you do need to sign up for the services I mentioned above. You can do that here.

• Box

• Dropbox

• Google Drive

• Microsoft OneDrive

After signing up, all you need to do is install odrive, then connect those accounts.

You are now free to move about your storage

odrive makes your cloud storage feel like local storage...because it is! Once you have a file synced to your computer, files can be dragged and dropped. You can move them around from account to account to keep things organized just the way you like.

Open and edit files directly from odrive and it will make sure when you hit that save button, the latest version of the file will make it to your cloud storage. And, if you are offline at the time you save, it will make sure the files get to the cloud once you re-establish internet connection. 

Double your storage, double your fun!

From one free-isseur to another, I love me some free stuff. We got 42GBs of free storage with a single email. How about using another email to get another 42GBs? odrive lets you connect to as many accounts as you want and you can literally do this as many times as you want, with as many different emails as you’d like to use (or create).

Happy Clouding!

odrive is available for Mac and Windows. No gimmicks. Just better access to all the stuff you already use online.

- Aric 

How to Use Your Dropbox and Box Together

Box vs Dropbox? Now you don't have to choose

Many users love Dropbox and many users love Box. A quick google search will return hundreds and thousands of results comparing the two. Should I use Dropbox? Should I use Box? Truth is there are plenty of good reasons to use both depending on what your needs are. Do you have your own Dropbox to share photos with your family? But perhaps your company is using Box for internal document sharing? 

With odrive you can easily use both Dropbox and Box together in one folder. Now you don't have to choose or switch back and forth between the apps on your computer.  

Use Box and Dropbox together in one folder 

Once you have odrive, just double click on the Box or Dropbox folder within the odrive folder. Login with your Box and Dropbox credentials to grant odrive permission to access those accounts. Don't worry - you're authenticating directly against their services and odrive doesn't see your passwords at all. 

To link Box or Dropbox to odrive, just double click on the specific app folder inside odrive. 

Have more than one Box or Dropbox account? No problem. You can link as many as you want to odrive so you can use them all at the same time. 

Easily sync and unsync any files or folders 

Now that your Box and Dropbox are linked to odrive, all your files and folders are immediately available. You can easily sync anything you want, and all your synced files are locally available on your computer even if you're offline. Don't worry if you have a ton of files across all your accounts. The beauty of our progressive sync is that odrive will sync only the files you need. Unlike the native Dropbox or Box clients that auto downloads all of your content onto your computer, odrive only syncs the stuff you want as you click through them. It's automatic, so you don't have go back and forth to configure which are the files you want to selectively sync, or not sync. 

All your files still stored within Box and Dropbox

If you don't need your files anymore, you can unsync them from your computer. Unsync removes the files from your computer but they are still stored within your Box and Dropbox storage. So instead of the actual file, odrive shows you a stub of all the stuff that are not currently synced. That way if you actually need them in the future, you can just double click on the files or folders to sync them back again. 

odrive combines everything into one folder so it's super easy for you to get all your stuff together. And it's free. So just try it and see if you like it! 

Using cloud storage is great. And it shouldn't matter if it's your own stuff or your work stuff - we can find a way to sync it and bring it together for you ;) 

Cheers,

Julia

How to Backup Your Computers, Dropbox, Facebook... Everything

(Please note that we have recently updated odrive and have temporarily removed our odrive File Server. We will be adding it back in as soon as possible though!)

I try to dedicate some time each week to push the envelope a bit with our latest and greatest technologies, as they emerge from Engineering. I think it is beneficial in a few ways. First, it can help expose issues that may not be readily apparent through conventional use cases. Second, it helps to get the gears turning on where the product can go next, and what other use cases could be satisfied with slight variations in the use of our technology. Third, I just like to tinker with things and see how I can stretch existing technology to satisfy the various technological gaps I perceive in my day-to-day life.

One of those "gaps"

At home we have 2 laptops, 2 desktops, and a “file server” system with 4TB of available storage. In addition, my wife and I use Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, all on separate accounts. We literally have stuff everywhere. Of course, the odrive client will give you easy access to those cloud services, but I’ve been wanting more than just access to all of my cloud data, I want access to everything, including my laptops and desktops. Not only that, but I’ve been wishing for an easy way to backup all of my stuff to my 4TB of storage. Desktops, laptops, cloud services… all of it. I’ve got the storage, so I might as well use it, right? Also, it will give me peace of mind to have redundancy throughout my digital domain.

Many of you are already familiar with our odrive client, but some of you may not yet know about our odrive File Server (ofs for short), since it was just recently released to the public. ofs allows you to use the odrive client to access all existing content on a system, while overlaying individual and group ACLs on top of that data, and giving you some very cool insight into what is happening in real time, to boot.

Double impact with odrive and odrive File Server

As I was playing around with both the odrive client and ofs last week, it occurred to me that, when using both together, I could take the typical deployment model i.e. the odrive client on desktops and laptops and ofs on server systems, and switch it around. This could give me a way to accomplish my access and backup goals pretty easily. Using this alternate configuration, I can backup all of my data into a single location (my aforementioned “file server”).

A quick side note about my “file server”: In reality it is just a glorified Windows desktop I threw together to assume the role I needed, hence the quotes I’m putting around it. In this scenario, pretty much any reasonably capable system could be used as the backup box. The main dependency is the storage you will need to house all of your stuff.

The switch-up solution

So, I installed ofs on all of our laptops and desktops and then installed the odrive client on the backup system. I then linked to our desktops, laptops, and online services from the odrive client. At this point I had a single odrive client, residing on my backup system, that had access to all of my data, and I was able to set it all up in a matter of minutes. With the addition of some secret config settings (which I will share with you fine folks), I then switched the odrive client from its default progressive sync mode to full sync mode.

Progressive sync mode is extremely well suited to day-to-day access to all of your stuff online. Full sync mode, however, fits our backup use case perfectly. With full sync mode enabled, everything we’ve linked to will be pulled down to our backup system and kept in perfect sync, automatically.

How can I set this up myself?

Not too shabby, eh? So here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the odrive File Server from here and install it on each of your machines, except the one you are using as your backup system.

2. Configure the admin user and note the link url of each machine. We will need this information later.

3. Create a new “backup” user on each machine running ofs and give this user access to the directories you wish to backup on that specific machine. For example your My Documents and Desktop directories.

4. Download the odrive client from here and install it on your backup system

5. Download the following config file here and place it on the backup system in either:

   1. Windows: %userprofile%/.odrive/config/

   2. OS X: ~/.odrive/config/

6. Restart the odrive client

7. Link to each machine setup in steps 1-3 in the odrive client. Use the “backup” user credentials created in step 3.

8. Link to all of your cloud services in the odrive client (Ex: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Facebook, etc.)

Now you can sit back, relax, and watch the magic happen as all of your files, from all of your disparate sources, automatically and continuously sync to your backup system. It will pick up changes to your sources very quickly too (between 5-15 seconds for most sources). This means you can also take a quick look at that one backup system, at any time, to eyeball everything you own, in near real-time.

Continuing the discussion..

There’s a lot to like here folks. Its easy, fast, and free, so give it a try.

I realize there are portions of this solution that can fleshed out into more detail, and I’m happy to delve further into the specifics in our odrive forums. So, if you have any questions or comments, head on over and let us know. We would love to hear from you!

You can also keep up-to-date on what’s going on here at odrive by following us on Twitter and Facebook.

- Tony

How to Download All Your Instagram Photos (and Hashtags too!)

<Update>

We have a new post regarding our recent re-addition of Instagram hashtags to odrive. Please take a look for updated information and let us know what you think!

</Update>

I love Instagram. I've been an avid Instagram user for a few years now, and I've collected hundreds of posts. Whenever I'm nostalgic or I want to share a story with another friend about a certain memory, I'll always go back to my Instagram because I've documented a lot of special moments on it. It's great.

Download all your Instagram photos into a folder 

Now it's even more exciting that our own app lets me download all my Instagram photos! Once you install odrive and link it to your Instagram, we'll automatically create two folders. One folder for all your own posts, and one folder for the posts you've liked. 

Download any Instagram hashtag you want 

Want to collect all the Instagram photos your friends posted from your wedding? Following a conference and want to see what's going on? Making a collage for upcoming fall fashion inspirations? odrive let's you sync other Instagrammers' posts that are tagged, so you can easily collect other photos as well! 

(Please note that we have recently updated odrive and have temporarily disabled the hashtag feature. We will be adding it back in as soon as possible though!)

It's super easy and pretty fun. Check it out if you want to download and back up all your Instagram photos! 

Cheers,

Julia

To read more about how odrive makes Instagram more useful:

https://medium.odrive.com/instagram-is-more-than-just-a-pretty-face-b98b07534413#.85kywvwa6

Gmail Tip: How to Get All Your Attachments

Ever wish there was an easier way to get certain Gmail attachments without digging through thousands of your email threads to find them? Maybe you’ve been working on a project with someone and you’re tired of constantly searching through all of your email exchanges with them. Well, you’re in luck because odrive is here to help keep you organized and efficient!

For a short period of time, I did some Patent Paralegal work on the side for an attorney. Hundreds of emails in Gmail were relayed back and forth between the two of us discussing various changes to patent applications, sending legal documents that needed to be signed by the inventors, and so on. Needless to say, whenever I prepared an application for filing, it was difficult to keep track of all the documents I needed. Having a good labeling system in Gmail was key for me during that process.

Gmail Attachments Organized The Way You Want Them

To this day, I still keep my Gmail pretty organized with labels and yes, I even have sub-labels, so I can quickly find what I need. That's why I'm excited that odrive now supports Gmail! You can easily get all of your attachments in one folder right on your desktop. The best part is that everything in your Gmail is automatically sorted by your unique labels and senders with odrive. If you're anything like me, having a product that mirrors your organizational system is fantastic!

Once you open your Gmail folder within odrive, all of your email attachments are organized by Labels and Senders.

All of my Gmail labels (seen on the left) are mirrored in my Gmail labels within odrive (seen on the right).

Need more context? Easily view the email your attachment came from!

Having just an email attachment without any context can be a challenge at times to understand. I know I've saved a file or two and have asked myself, "What was this for again?" or "What was I supposed to change?" odrive takes the guessing out of the equation by opening the exact email message within Gmail for you. Just right-click and select "Open in Gmail" from the odrive menu.

(Please note that we have recently updated odrive and have temporarily disabled the "Open in Gmail" feature. We will be adding it back in as soon as possible though!)

To gain more context into a Gmail attachment, just right-click and select "Open in Gmail" from the odrive menu.

The email containing your attachment will automatically open in your browser using Gmail.

You can even save disk space by unsyncing your Gmail attachments

When you're done working on your files, you can easily unsync them to save space on your computer. Just go to the folder, right-click and select "Unsync Folder" from the odrive menu. This will keep your email attachments safely stored in Gmail, but remove them locally from your computer to save you space. Don't worry, you can always sync them again whenever you need.

To unsync a folder when you're done, right-click and select "Unsync Folder" from the odrive menu.

When your folder has successfully unsynced, a window will appear to reveal how much space you've saved!

So what are you waiting for? Try out Gmail with odrive today and let us know what you think! :)

- Michelle

For more on how odrive improves your workflow with Gmail: https://medium.odrive.com/email-is-dead-long-live-email-a5f2393c1319#.k9qx6m894

Download All Your Facebook Albums

 

I accumulated over 5000 photos and 40 albums on Facebook

I've been using Facebook for 10 years. Over all these years I've uploaded over 5000 photos and accumulated over 40 albums on Facebook. 

As embarrassing as some of my college photos might have been, I didn't want to delete them from Facebook, because I don't have the original copies of a lot of them anymore. As a result I had to make many of my Facebook albums private, but they are still just sitting on Facebook because downloading each picture one by one is a huge hassle. 

I'm sure many of you reading this may not have the same problem because you are much smarter about backing up your stuff (I was too lazy when I was younger). But regardless I'm sure a lot of you do have photos stuck on Facebook somehow. Pictures from your summer vacation, or photos others tagged of you from a wedding last weekend. 

How to get all your Facebook photos back with odrive

Just install odrive and link it to your Facebook account. odrive automatically downloads all of your photos and your albums onto your computer for you. Even photos tagged of you too! All your tagged photos are automatically sorted by year , so you can easily find whatever you want. 

Check out the quick video - I got all my Facebook photos and albums within minutes :) 

Here at odrive, we want to bring all your stuff together so you can easily manage everything the way you want to. 

It's super easy and it's free! Try it out and let us know what you think ;)

Cheers,

Julia

50 Shades of Free Cloud Storage

You may have heard that the cost of cloud storage is near zero. This has driven many cloud services to offer more and more free storage as part of their offering. For your storing pleasure, I have collected below 50 cloud services that offer free storage. This list alone gives you over 23,000 GBs of free storage!

Of course, not all services are created equal. Some offer a ridiculous amount of storage that most of us will unlikely ever use up (e.g. Tencent 10 TBs). Others offer a nominal amount that could be used up in short time if you incorporate it into your workflow (e.g. Evernote 50 MBs). Some services may be better suited for specific use cases like photo uploading, media streaming or backup from a NAS storage device. You may choose to utilize certain services because of geographical location. 

If you are going to make use of several services, as we all do, a good way to provide a unified experience is odrive. With odrive, you can access from a single folder on your PC and Mac several services on the list such as Dropbox, GoogleDrive, Box, and OneDrive, as well as Facebook and Instagram. 

Enjoy!

How to "Get All Your Sh*t Together"

If your daily commute here in the Bay Area goes by Brokaw Road on the 880, you might have noticed a new billboard on the side of the freeway starting today. 

Silicon Valley, don't be alarmed by the giant poopy emoji. It is a friendly sign that we just put up to kick off odrive's beta campaign ;) 

We Built odrive Because Everything is Everywhere 

Do you use Google Drive? Or maybe OneDrive? Do you have multiple Dropbox accounts, with one for your team at work and another one for your personal music collection? Or maybe you have both Box and Dropbox Pro? How many photos did you upload to Facebook over the last 10 years? Oh right, and how about all the email attachments you've accumulated on Gmail? 

Truth is a lot of us use a lot of apps now days. Your clients might want to share files with Box, but then your friends want to share videos on Dropbox. It's hard to choose just one. 

We created odrive to make your life a little easier as your digital life continues to grow. You don't have to choose. Don't worry about consolidating or switching back and forth. Let us help you simplify so you can just get to all your stuff hassle-free. 

Get All Your Sh*t Together 

odrive is your folder to everything online. It links to your existing apps and other storage services, so you can simplify how to access and manage all your stuff that is scattered everywhere. 

With odrive, you can get everything together in a simple sync folder. Our progressive sync lets you quickly sync only the stuff you want when you want it. And if you don't really need those files anymore? Just unsync anything with one click so you don't have to use up all your hard drive space.

Everything in One Folder

Our goal is to help you get everything together in the easiest way possible. Right now you can use odrive with Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Facebook and Instagram. Soon you'll be able to use it with Gmail, Box, Salesforce and more. 

Oh and it's more than just apps! We also have a way for you to connect to your existing storage that isn't in the cloud. Soon you can even use odrive with your file servers too! 

We Respect Your Privacy - What's Yours is ALWAYS Yours

Your files are as safe as wherever you already uploaded them to. Don't worry because we're not storing anything. odrive doesn't copy or store any of your files. It is just an easier way to access what you already have in one place (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc). We do not have access to your stuff so you can have the peace of mind knowing whatever is yours will always be yours. 

Did I even mention odrive is free? Just download odrive right now at www.odrive.com.

Do it. Try it. Tell us what you think and we hope you'll love it too :)

Cheers,

Julia 

Designers, How to Use Cloud Storage to Improve Your Client Relationships

I am no longer a freelance designer and there were a plethora of reasons why I left the solo life (*cough* legit health insurance *cough*). As I moved away from my clients, I found they were hard-pressed to let me go. So for most of them, I offered to continue working on a “need only” basis (which loosely translates to a “most of my free time” basis).

Technology builds better relationships

Back when I was 100% freelance, I quickly adopted cloud storage because it allowed me to share, organize, and backup important work. As a part of agreeing to anything contractual, I made sure my clients and I had shared cloud storage of some kind. I required them to 1) provide me access to their existing storage or 2) offered to create an account in the cloud storage provider of their choice. More often than not we chose Google Drive, because it was 15GBs, had email associated with it for additional communication, and productivity apps that made it easy for my clients to make revisions.

I shared this idea with many of my colleagues (at the time I was getting a design related Masters) who were quick to follow suit with their clients. Not only did it make for faster work environment, it also made my customers feel more in control and connected to our projects.

Conquering chaos in the cloud

At my peak, I had 20+ clients I was consistently working with – which meant I had 20 different cloud storage areas with all my files. Having all that free cloud storage was great for business, but it made for an organizational nightmare at times. My preference was (still is) to work with desktop apps over browsers. But in order to work with multiple Google Drive accounts, I had to log out and log in with different credentials (same with Dropbox and OneDrive) and wait for all the files to be downloaded locally. I wasn’t about to waste my time or limited disk space doing this, so I stuck to the web browser. This left everything in my download folder, which required more steps to stay organized and still required local disk space.

Efficiency, thy name is odrive

It wasn’t until I started working with my new company, a cloud storage company, that I realized there were easier ways to share storage. In winter of last year, we announced the beta for our newest product odrive which turned out to be the answer I had been looking for years ago. odrive lets you connect to all your different cloud storage (even multiple accounts on the same platform) and makes all that storage walk, talk, and act like local storage. Here’s what my work environment looks like with the clients I still have.

All the folders are associated with the different storage accounts of my different clients. I don’t really care where the storage is, I just need my stuff when I need to work on it. With odrive, the files are stored locally, so I can work on them locally. I make an edit. It saves to the cloud automatically.

I work on video quite a bit and we all know video files can quickly eat up your disk space. I used to load everything onto my external drives to save space on my computer, now I put my free cloud storage to work. I can pick and choose files I no longer need and simply unsync them from my computer. They stay safely stored in the cloud and I can access them anytime I need them again.

A better version of me

odrive makes me more legit and professional because I can work way faster and stay organized easily. Not only do I use it to work with my former freelance clients, I’m currently the resident media/web dude/graphic artist at Oxygen Cloud and use it to collaborate with outside vendors (because I too enjoy being closer to the work being done for me). Give it a try and post some comments about your thoughts, improvements, or any other needs you have related to cloud storage. 

Cloud Storage Is Eating The World Alive →

“Dead man walking.” That is what many in the storage industry are calling IBM’s storage hardware business. But its storage competitors, including EMC or HP, should not be so quick to wave that flag, as they may follow suit before too long. We are already seeing similar trending signs of their downfall.

War of the Giants

The cloud storage war being waged by Amazon, Google and Microsoft has been well publicized, and is resulting in the cost of all cloud infrastructure including storage racing to zero.

As you can see from the graph below, Amazon was the only real game in town for several years, and the price of cloud storage hardly moved the needle. It was only after Microsoft and Google got into the game in 2010 that we saw any real price movements. There were two distinct price battles waged in 2012, with moderate price drops. Earlier this year in March, the gloves came off and the cloud storage prices bottomed out to the current $.024/GB level.

Where do we go from here? Undoubtedly, to zero. When? Perhaps as soon as this summer or by year end. Will it literally go to zero? Maybe no, maybe yes. If you only had to pay $.001/GB, that works out to $1/TB. Oh yeah, that feels like zero!

Casualty of War

It’s well established that cloud storage is 10X better. It’s more accessible, more secure, elastic, pay-as-you-go.

Today, we are all on mobile devices, work everywhere and generate ever increasing amount of data. Our work and personal lives are set up as the perfect playground for cloud storage.

Now that the cost of cloud storage is near-zero, the business choice to abandon clunky, expensive traditional storage is a no brainer.

Some Not-So-Bold Predictions

For most small businesses and newer companies born in the cloud, the shift to cloud storage is already happening and will be at close to 100 percent in three years.

For larger businesses with existing data centers and lots of existing data, the shift will be slower and take a different path. Most will start with less sensitive data sets. As reflexive concerns like data sovereignty and regulatory compliance give way to convenience and common sense, the transformation will be complete. Within five years, I believe that a majority of enterprises will have at least 50 percent of their data in the cloud.

Zombie Life

No doubt, the traditional storage players will attempt to slow the adoption with the same tired, overplayed FUD, but the train has already left the building. However, this will just be prolonging the inevitable. It will be like the un-dead walking among us. As we’ve seen in the movies, the zombies can now run fast and talk intelligibly. Perhaps the traditional storage players have a fighting chance after all.

Author’s note: The data research for the top graph involved a mix of public announcements, a search of the Internet Archive and efforts from others who attempted to track the price changes such asDavid Rosenthal. This also involved some guesstimation on my part for some begin and end dates of a price change as I was able to ascertain a price on a given date but was not able to confirm with a public announcement.

As you can see, the negative trend spans the industry and does not discriminate.

Editor’s note: Alex Teu is the vice president of business development at Oxygen Cloud and odrive.