Download to the Cloud? | Hacker News Reader

Download to the Cloud?

3 pointsnrbafna7 comments

There are various cloud storage services. Be it Dropbox or Google Docs or SkyDrive. But, all them offer upload option only from the hard-disk. A really useful option in the upload menu could be to it point it to some url and download the resource directly to the the cloud service without downloading to my computer. Though this may seem like a feature bloat but consider this scenario. I am using dropbox on my android or on a public pc and don't currently have access to own computer but want to upload a file to Dropbox. Current system would want me to download it to my phone/public pc first and upload the same again to Dropbox. So, the process uses extra network usage which could be easily avoided.

P.S. If some implementation already exists, feel free to comment.

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You should check out http://put.io. It works best for videos since it has built in streaming.

For the record, however: Dropbox's core functionality is synchronization across multiple computers. While it serves very well as one, it wasn't built to be used only as a storage service, so downloading files to your Dropbox seems a bit out of scope for the service.

So, how about Expansion?

I use Jungle Disk with my Amazon S3. Jungle disk has a mapped network drive directly bound to the Amazon S3 bucket of choice.

When I download I can choose to download and / or drag to my jungle disk cloud drive. Thus bypassing my local store and going straight to the cloud.

I agree with what your saying. I think web applications should allow me to use the cloud storage of my choice to store all my application settings and data.

Hi. I am curious. While downloading, wouldn't it store the temp file on your pc, and then alter/transfer it to your chosen destination? E.g you need to download it and then upload it.

Or does this only go for some browsers? if so, which?

This might bypass your local disk, but it still incurs the extra network traffic since you have to pull all the bytes to your PC before sending them out to S3. If you're moving large files and have an asymmetric connection, then it is likely that you won't even bypass local disk since you'll have completed downloading long before uploading is done.

In any event, I don't think this solves the problem at all.

Honestly, i didn't of the temp part. Ignorance on my part.

New question. So, could there a be mechanism to skip temp altogether?

Also, with chrome plugin to view document attachment straightaway in Google Docs, will it do the same thing? That will make the trivial, nonetheless, slightly convenient.

There seems to be an time-zone delay between the comments :)

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