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Comment by hemancuso | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug for my product, ExpanDrive. Version 4 came out a week and a half ago and adds support for OneDrive along with a ton of other cloud storage providers.

http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive

Right now the best Cloud-storage desktop clients: Dropbox/Google Drive/Box/Copy/OneDrive, all do sync of the entire repository (unless you're willing to do the work of selective sync). Apart from that you're not left with many options, other than the web, for moving data to and from your giant 1TB account. ExpanDrive bridges that gap by providing access as a network drive. You connect and interact with the data without needing to bring it all in. We keep a big local cache, and do writes in the background so your saves feel instant, like Dropbox. If you've not checked out the software recently, take another look.

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Very cool - somehow I hadn't seen this before, and you've been around for 10 Years, and I try and follow all things storage. Not sure how I missed your product.

I know AWS is fine with this sort of usage (they charge for storage + data access) - any sense as to whether Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive are okay with applications being written on top of their cloud storage?

I.E. is this a hack, or something I should feel comfortable using as a storage option. And, other than AWS, are there any vendors you feel are most likely to be okay with using their service in this way?

If they didn't want this kind of thing they wouldn't/shouldn't make an API, like Amazon Cloud Drive [no API]. It's not a hack :)

"Linux version coming mid-2014" .. So can we expect the linux version soon?

What is the difference between ExpandDrive and Strongsync?

Linux version is in private beta now.

Strongsync is a hot folder, like Dropbox. Works directly atop S3 with no server needed. Full conflict resolution, etc.

ExpanDrive is a network drive.

Could you please put your price on the landing page?

I just got a download link and further down the page the price of a upgrade from a older version.

Before I download I am more interested in what I am downloading (is it a time limited demo?) and what the price is if I want a license. Otherwise its not worth my time to try the demo download.

Excellent product; I've used ExpanDrive in the past and it works remarkably well.

Curious--any chance you can put together support for OneDrive for Business? Microsoft currently lacks a proper client for that service on the Mac, and it's a minor pain.

Just finished support for Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage [coming in 4.1 update, this week]. OneDrive for business is next on the list.

Hey, I'm just about to buy the upgrade from 3 to 4 but I'm wondering if you're going to make it behave more like a native Windows app? The panel that pops up from the system tray has some weird webview-like behaviour on right-click.

I also managed to bring down Explorer when opening Google Drive but I'll get a better bug report to you soon.

The only thing that makes me sad is that CBFS (what ExpanDrive uses as its backend) is really the only solution for doing filesystem stuff on Windows. Dokan just needs some love and a code signing certificate or two.

Ping us with some more detailed thoughts. Happy to listen.

CBFS is good. We wrote our own for v1&2. Better to let somebody else focus on that and we can focus on the rest.

Do you have a direct email? I've talked to Jeff via support@ before.

jmancuso@expandrive.com

OneDrive in Windows 8.1 is built into the OS - it shows up as a folder in Explorer. After reading your site, I'm still confused; how is ExpanDrive different / better than the OneDrive OS integration? Can you describe a scenario where ExpanDrive is superior to OneDrive + Windows 8.1? Also, once you've done that here, it would be great to add that to your advertising copy on your site - perhaps with a walk-through of the product to show how it's better than the built-in OS support :)

A major frustration for me is that OneDrive does not show up as a folder in Windows 8.1, unless you link your Windows account with a Microsoft account. I absolutely won't be logging into my computers with my Microsoft account, which has made OneDrive much more difficult to use. It works well from Office, but nothing else. I've tried installing the old version of the client, and it fails with an error that I already have a newer version.

It sounds like ExpanDrive would probably solve this issue for me. (At least until Microsoft hopefully adds back support for using OneDrive with local accounts at some point.)

OneDrive in Win8 breaks quite a few applications that measure disk space or read files without knowing about the new weird symlinky stuff that OneDrive uses.

e.g. https://bitbucket.org/windirstat/windirstat/issue/53/support...

https://github.com/FauxFaux/PuTTYTray/issues/125

I love ExpanDrive and use it every day. Thanks for adding OneDrive support in v4 :)

ExpanDrive's WebDAV performance has been kind of rocky, though. From what I can tell, it doesn't appear to support byte range seeking. To get to the middle of a 2 GB file, it tries to download the first 1 GB. Is that something addressed in the v4 update?

Definitely support it. Perhaps a server incompatibility? Can you re-ping support@expandrive.com ? If you have some temporary credentials for us to test with, it would be super-helpful

I'm a bit disappointed about the paid upgrade, it really feels like ExpanDrive is only working properly since this last version. For me, v3 has always been dirt slow with cloud storage.

Hrm. I used to be a very frequent user of ExpanDrive, then I changed jobs and I haven't needed it for what I was using it before. I may take a look at it for personal use now, though.

Browsed around your site - how do you guys handle encryption of data? Or do you even? I'd look into using this with S3, but only if client side encryption is somehow offered.

No client side encryption, yet.

Coming in the fall in v4.5

Any plans for a Linux version?

Edit: to answer my own question, the web page says "Linux version coming mid-2014" :)

ping jmancuso@expandrive.com if you want to jump on the beta

so this is like duplicati? does it have encryption?

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