Access Dropbox as a network drive on Mac and Windows | Hacker News Reader

Access Dropbox as a network drive on Mac and Windows

blog.expandrive.com

54 pointshemancuso31 comments

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Congratulations. Now, can you explain me, in dumbest possible terms:

a) What is this?

b) Why do I want to use this? What advantage does it give me over using just Dropbox?

c) Does it consume disk space?

d) If it does not, does it have a cloud component? Probably not, but I'm not sure what's going on here.

Your website doesn't really tell anything about your product—you might want to take a look on that.

It's software that lets you mount Dropbox as if it were a network drive. It's advantageous to just Dropbox because it doesn't consume disk space. It doesn't have a cloud component; it uses the Dropbox API to interface with Dropbox's servers directly.

> It doesn't have a cloud component

What is the 'cloud component' of Dropbox. Isnt that just the (storage) servers? Isnt the native Dropbox app using the "Dropbox API to interface with Dropbox's servers directly"?

Also advantageous because there is less latency between saving "locally" and the changes being reflected on the remote server (or client) as compared to Dropbox. Dropbox has to sync up to the cloud then back down to your remote server, whereas this is direct. That latency can be a pain if you're making a lot of small changes often and wanting to see the outcome.

I use Expandrive pretty regularly for development involving S3--it's much more convenient than most of the other ways to manually sync or transfer files to/from S3. I can just treat the bucket like a folder on my HD.

It can also replicate the basic Dropbox feature (syncing) more cheaply, since you can pay directly for S3 storage instead of paying Dropbox to pay for S3 storage. Obviously you lose some features there, but it could be worth it. DreamObjects currently is 3 cents/GB for storage plus 3 cents/GB for transfer out, so $36/100GB/year + transfer, compared to Dropbox's flat $99 for 100GB.

Some developers I've worked with also like editing remote files with it, though it seems like most editors already have some kind of SFTP support anyway, and things like `git status` are unusably slow.

Overall it's definitely a niche product but it has made my life easier occasionally!

Does it really "sync" your Dropbox folder though? My understanding is that it mounts the target service as a network volume. This means you need a network connection to the target service in order to access the files stored there.

One of the major benefits of Dropbox is that the files really are sync'd to your local drive. If you're offline, you can still get to the files. Changes are sync'd later when the network becomes available.

It didn't quite make the release but Google Drive and SkyDrive support is coming very soon. As are alerts for changes.

The big win is that you don't need to sync in the entire dataset, and you can access multiple accounts.

Is there a public API for change notification in Dropbox? Last time I checked there isn't one.

Yup: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs#delta

You also posted '[and soon, Linux]' a while back (late April).

Any word on this? :)

Still in development, mostly a packaging issue right now. But it's working! 4-8 weeks out.

> 4-8 weeks

I think you mean 6-8 weeks.

http://sixtoeightweeks.com/

I was an ExpanDrive user for a long time. I used it for painless SSH mounts in Windows. I don't have a need for it these days, but if I did, I wouldn't hesitate installing it again. Recommended!

I am an ExpanDrive customer and I am very happy with it. I just upgraded to version 3 and it is very nice to mount drives over SFTP from where ever I am.

All in all the product is polished and works better than OSXFuse and having to open SMB ports, etc for my use.

If you just need the local drive part on Windows, I have been using this for some time to make the complete Dropbox folder accessible as a local drive m: on all my computers. Of course you still need to run Dropbox to handle the syncing.

- create a file containing this: subst m: c:\Users\<username>\My Documents\My Dropbox\

- put this file somewhere in your Dropbox folder (that way it will get synced to all your other computers and you can use it there, too)

- add a link to it in the Start Menu->Startup program group on all your computers

Voilà!

Thats a nice tip, the syncing to other PCs only works if all your PCs run the same version of windows and you use the same username and directory structure though.

Yeah, that's true. You can make it more robust this way:

subst m: %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\My Dropbox\

I don't understand what this is. From looking at the webpage it seems to be an interface to a remote file store, but we've had such things for years, such as sshfs and FUSE. What am I misunderstanding?

It has a nice GUI and is simple to use. It's like not understanding a nice FTP/sftp client because there are free/CLI versions available. It's not for everyone, but it my experience with using it for sftp mounting is that it was great in OSX years ago.

How is the sftp/sshfs support on Windows for expand drive? I've used opensource options in the past for Windows and they were all pretty buggy. One that isn't so much would be one worth buying imho.

The original version of the product, back pre-2009 was called SftpDrive and was Windows only. In many ways it has long been our core product. But as time goes on more people are using various cloud services and fewer people are using SFTP.

Thanks. I prefer sftp for my own servers so I don't have to open up another point of access (plus for mounting things like my Android phone [it's rooted and I mount it with ssh to gain access to the live sqlite db in apps I'm working on]).

Tried out the trial a bit ago and it seems to work fine with a dropbear ssh client for Android so I can mount my Android device. Some clients I've had issues with working with dropbear or not letting me connect with root access (and the root directory, but no issues like that here). Happy with it so far.

Update, had some issues with it refreshing the cache. Hitting f5 didn't seem to change file statuses after erasing files (using windows 7). Had to disconnect and reconnect the client to get them to update in sftp.

I've been using expandrive for the past year (and just upgraded to v3) and the sftp support is the fastest that I've tried. It caches what the directory structure looks like so browsing is quick. Opening and saving files takes about 1-2 seconds on average. Sometimes directories will get stale if I create something on the server, but hitting F5 or refreshing the directory fixes it pretty quickly.

I use it with ST2 for my editor, directly saving onto my remote dev box, and it works fairly well. My biggest hangup is actually with ST2 - I can't individually refresh project sub-directories, only the main one, and saving files in ST2 is a blocking operation -- can't do anything else, and when a save takes a couple of seconds, it can get frustrating. I've tried the SFTP plugin for ST2 and I still prefer this route.

I've had exactly your experience (expandrive, ST2, SFTP plugin) on OSX and I've also arrived at the same solution. Works well enough, but as you said, ST2's lack of auto refreshing of directories is a bit troublesome. Furthermore I've had situations where Expandrive wouldn't refresh either and I had to unmount/mount again - improvements in that regard is what I'd be looking for most in an update.

You have 3 options for mounting SFTP in Windows.

Open Source and the fastest client https://code.google.com/p/win-sshfs/

Free, but with limited functionality. http://www.eldos.com/sftp-net-drive/

Best UI, but way too expensive. http://www.expandrive.com/

They're all somewhat stable, but their performance is far from as fast as Linux SSHFS. Win-sshfs is much faster than Expandrive and Eldos SFTP, but slightly more buggy.

Of those three I recommend win-sshfs, Expandrive would have been worth it if its pricing were not so extreme. You get support though!

So the implication is that it doesn't consume local disk space if connected as network drive, right? That would be a very useful feature!

Let me recommend Syncovery for doing the same job for me for the last couple of years

http://www.syncovery.com/

I'd love to see the sales numbers for this sort of a product. I just bet it's taking in more than an average HN-grade startup :)

Is this only a drive interface to files elsewhere, or is it a local-sync solution too, a-la-dropbox?

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