Filtering by Tag: Google Drive

Access All Of Your Google Drive Accounts From One Place

Added on by Aric Johnson.

Are you one of the 500 million+ people using Google Drive? Of course you are! Free email, 15GBs of free cloud storage, and the ability to collaborate in real-time on documents provides more than enough reason to get on the Google train. In fact, it’s so simple and powerful that many of you have multiple accounts.

Unfortunately, Google Drive doesn't make it easy for users like you who regularly work between multiple accounts (and other cloud storage for that matter), especially from the desktop. Fret not – there is a better way. odrive makes using multiple Google Drive accounts seamless and gives you access to all of your files and folders, in all of your accounts, natively.

Easily connect as many Google accounts as you need

Connecting to your Google Drive account(s) is super easy. Just login to odrive using your Google account. That's it! All of your files and folders are now available to you, right on your desktop.

 

odrive authenticates directly against your Google account. odrive never see's or stores any passwords or files. Communication happens directly between the odrive desktop client and your Google storage.

 

To connect a second account, you can use choose "Add Link" from the odrive taskbar menu and select "Google Drive".  You can also navigate to https://www.odrive.com/browse and click on the big plus sign. Then rinse and repeat with as many Google Drive accounts as you'd like to add.

Work seamlessly on any file

odrive lets you to access everything in your account and intelligently opens your files in the correct manner. For example, Google Docs files are all web based, so from odrive, they will automatically open up Google Docs in your browser.

Double-clicking a Google Doc opens it directly in your browser ready to edit.

Other regular files, like Microsoft Word or Powerpoint files will open in their native applications. You can edit and save these files like you normally would and your odrive folder will automatically be make sure your updates get synced to your Google Drive storage.

Double-clicking a Word document opens it directly in Microsoft Word ready to edit.

Sync only what you need and nothing you don’t

If you’ve used the Google Drive app, you’ve noticed that non-Google Doc files get downloaded to your computer to make them available, whether you want them or not. odrive, on the other hand, relies on a unique Progressive Sync platform that delivers super fast access to all your stuff without taking up tons of space on your local disk. odrive only syncs the files you need by only syncing folders you’ve browsed into. Furthermore, if files are big, odrive refrains from syncing them immediately and shows you a virtual file stub. If you want that file, just double-click it and it will be synced to your local disk.

odrive-blog-unsycnedfiles.png

Save tons of disk space with unsync

odrive also allows you the option to free up space on your local computer by unsyncing files. Files and folders that are unsynced remain safe in your storage, and can be easily re-synced and accessed whenever you need them. Just right-click any file or folder and select unsync. If you work with big media files or lots of images, you’ll love unsync (and so will your hard disk).

Be prepared to be amazed – try odrive today!

odrive isn’t cloud storage, so it doesn’t store any of your data or passwords. It connects directly to your Google Drive (or any of the many apps we connect to) and delivers a better, faster way to work with all your different Google Drive accounts from one place, all for free!

You're now free to choose between all storage

Added on by Jeff Lin.

This past weekend, I replaced a fan on my Drobo FS, a NAS unit that has been part of my digital life for over four years.  As I waded through tiny screws and cramped steel casing to get to the internals, I kept thinking to myself "why am I wasting my time with this?" And "why haven't I moved everything (mostly photos) to one of those recent free unlimited storage providers like Google Photos or Amazon Cloud Drive?"

 Attribution: Sergiodlarosa | Wikimedia Commons

 Attribution: Sergiodlarosa | Wikimedia Commons

My NAS, My Mastodon

For years, I've been lovingly referring to my NAS as a mastodon.  A powerful, strong, useful beast... that will eventually become extinct.  Cloud storage would surely win.  No hardware to personally maintain.  Ultimate elasticity and redundancy.  Much lower total cost of ownership.  A NAS with disks could cost upwards of $600 or $700, which could instead be user to pay for many years of unlimited cloud storage.  The cost of cloud storage has essentially been a big fat race to zero.  So what's my problem, and why am I living in the past?

Ultimately, I'm still anxious about privacy and skeptical about some of the true costs of free storage.  For example, Google Photos has a powerful search feature for my uploaded photos where I was able to enter a search for "watermelon" and find a picture from last year of my little girl wearing a watermelon dress.  While this is a killer feature for end-users, I also find it to be a bit unnerving.

Projecting into the future, Google will have yet an even better idea of where I've been and what I've been doing.  Demographic and psychographic marketing will be considered child's play compared to having total individual information about me.  If I upload camping pictures every month of me in an Arcteryx jacket, sipping on a can of Pepsi, then I'm probably going to be served Pepsi ads all day until my laptop gets diabetes.  I won't be able to go a day without seeing jackets, tents, and other gear from REI, The North Face, and Patagonia on sale. I won't be able to escape my consumer self.

Not everybody is squeamish about these kinds of things.  Today, for much of my data, it doesn't really matter.  But tomorrow may be a different story--when is too much information too much power?  I'm very interested in seeing how cloud storage and privacy evolve over the next decade.  There may be paid services that grow out of backlash against information harvesting.  Encryption, security, and two-factor authentication may quickly become more of a concern in the near future, at least for certain personal files and work files.

When it comes to storage, I am Pro-choice

Fortunately, in a multiverse of both storage options and user needs, a product like odrive can level the playing field and facilitate choices.  Without odrive, it would be painful to use multiple storage sources for content with different needs and contexts (e.g. OneDrive for my documents, Amazon Cloud Drive for my photos, a Google Drive account for work files, a personal Google Drive account, etc.).  With odrive it's simple... you can tailor a blended storage strategy according to the specific needs of your data--be it privacy, security, cost, accessibility features, reliability, compliance, or anything else.

So for now, I will keep my mastodon and move my photo archive to Amazon Cloud Drive (sorry, Google).  Fortunately, I have odrive File Server running on another computer at home so I can conveniently access my Drobo's contents as well.  Will there ever be a one-size-fits-all solution for all of my data?  I don't think so.  And with odrive, it doesn't matter.  Every provider can be a winner by providing the best solution for a particular use case, and every user can be a winner by using a combination of the best tools available.

Storage providers will come and go, but with odrive you can fluidly combine and organize your files so you're never forced to choose just one.

- Jeff

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

Added on by Aric Johnson.


“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!

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).

odrive-blog-42GB-folderview.png

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.

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 Backup Your Computers, Dropbox, Facebook... Everything

Added on by Tony Magliulo.

(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

backupeverything.jpg

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

Added on by Alex Teu.

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!

odrive-freecloudstoragelist.jpg


How to "Get All Your Sh*t Together"

Added on by Aric Johnson.

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. 

odrive-getallyourpooptogether

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