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

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!