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Comment by hemancuso | Hacker News Reader

Very cool project! Close to my heart. I write ExpanDrive

http://www.expandrive.com

Which operates with the same idea, up to a 10Gb local cache and will stream out larger files. Supports a huge number of storage back ends (Dropbox, Google Drive/GCS, Amazon S3/Drive, OneDrive, SFTP, etc). Also can pin files and trees into the cache.

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Bought a license maybe 4-5 years ago because the website said that Linux support is coming very soon. It's been coming since then. Tried to sign up for the beta but didn't even get an answer. :(

Rclone can mount 20+ backends and has caching and mounting support. I guess you can do something similar with Rclone. Plus it's FOSS.

Originally said "coming soon" to see if anyone was interested. Turns out they are!

Can you explain a little more what you mean by this?

It means that is was not actually "coming soon". It said that, just to see if many people are interested in that feature. If there were many people interested, development of that feature would start. If not many people were interested, I guess the text would have been just removed. Makes sense?

Pretty convoluted to me...

But at least they've been working on it for a good minute:

https://twitter.com/expandrive/status/1000012200612950017

We took a beta list to gauge interest. No sense in all the work if nobody cares.

Yeah but why not just ask if people were interested? Instead of saying something that wasn't true..

Because everyone and their dog would say they want it, or are interested in it, even if they don't actually want it. This puts up a (small) barrier that helps gauge true interest.

It's the same idea as setting up a landing page for a product that doesn't exist and seeing if people click "pricing" or "buy now" to determine if there is a market for it.

No, it's simple, it's just a lie.

(Sorry, don't mean to attack anyone or put too much blame, but let's call it what it is.)

Technically the lie really only extends to the "soon" part, since it is coming. And software regularly has a list of future features that often don't ship. Would love to chat if you were ever interested!

Hi, I am always up for a chat, my email is mail@konstantinschubert.com. :)

To get back to our argument: By the time you said "coming soon" you didn't know if it was coming at all, so I would call that a bit of a lie.

Anywhere I can sign up to be notified when the Linux version is out?

linux@expandrive.com

Why is the local cache limited to 10 GB?

I am building Zero to store my personal pictures and videos and I feel like 10GB local cache means that only the last month of pictures and videos is local, which seems very limited.

Are there any technical reasons why the cache cannot be 500GB?

It used to be unlimited but most of the users ultimately desired to offload data and access it on demand. It should be configurable but currently isn’t.

Very pedantic but I think "Built with in Boston." is intended to be "Built in Boston." in the footer?

There is a red heart after "with" - or at least there is on every machine I've tried.

Script blocker bit me there, you are right :). Looks like a very interesting project!

Based on "I write ExpanDrive", I thought the author was Chinese.

A bit rude. I like that phrasing.

I use expandrive everyday. Thanks man.

Is that similar to the Drive FS client then (except it's obviously multi-cloud and backend)?

https://support.google.com/a/answer/7491144?hl=en

Any progress on the Linux version?

https://twitter.com/expandrive/status/1000012200612950017

Yup!

Does everything get stored in the cloud - even files that are in the 10Gb local cache?

Yes, unless you're offline - in which case it stays in the cache until a connection is available.

Happy customer of Expandrive for quite a while. Got a lifetime license.

I should also switch to the lifetime license sometime, Expandrive is indeed really an awesome product!

Thanks!

Sounds good. At what stage would I need to buy the license? I could not find any info on that.

“ExpanDrive runs unlicensed and fully featured for 7 days giving you a chance to try everything out. Once the trial period expires you’ll need to buy a license or you will be limited to 20 minutes of use.”

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