How to Sync Unlimited Storage
We’re at the point where most people have more files in the cloud than on their local computer. The amount of photos, videos, documents, and other data that we’re producing is exploding. Some estimates predict that total data production worldwide will grow from around 1 zettabyte in 2010 to likely a few hundred zettabytes by 2025.
Even though storage hardware technology is improving, our outsized ability to consume storage is so voracious... the individual who has chewed through a small pile of USB drives or disks for their NAS units (old school) already in their lifetimes is more and more commonplace. And that’s just for their personal stuff. Corporate data is an even larger beast to tame.
So what’s the best way to access all that information on my computer without getting it all onto my computer’s hard drive? What’s the best way to go about syncing an unlimited amount of storage?
I’ll make the case for why odrive is the king of the mountain for syncing your vast data horde. Consider the following important aspects of odrive’s unlimited sync capabilities below.
Multicloud Access
An unlimited sync app needs to be able to sync your storage wherever it resides. I work with multiple Google Drives, multiple Dropbox accounts, Amazon S3 storage, and more. I’m not alone. From an overall cloud strategy perspective, enterprises are embracing a multicloud reality (a recent Gartner survey showed that 81% of responses from enterprises using public cloud had at least two providers for compute infrastructure), and this is echoed by increasing popularity for hybrid or multicloud approaches to storage as well. To help me stay on top of all of my work and personal data, I need something capable of syncing everything universally.
Since I’m making demands, I’d also want to make it easier to access my files residing in application storage (e.g. Facebook, Slack, SharePoint, Procore) and on my file servers. And I don’t ever want to have to bother with migrating files.
A good sync app should be able to access all the storage I use, and odrive can handle all of this with aplomb. Link over 25 different kinds of storage.
It’s also comforting to know that I don’t need to install a pile of sync clients on my computer. I only need one to do the trick.
File Virtualization
With unlimited storage in the cloud, I wouldn’t want to sync everything to my local machine or it would eat up my bandwidth and hard drive capacity. With odrive, you see everything available in the cloud initially presented directly in Finder or Windows Explorer as a placeholder file. These placeholders don’t take up any space, and the full file content is only downloaded as needed, on demand, when you try to access a file for the first time.
Folder Virtualization
With all of the storage I have, I also wouldn’t want my sync app to inefficiently spend processing power (which translates to fan noise and battery consumption) and network bandwidth (making voluminous API calls to various storage backends) trying to keep my entire dataset in sync.
Most of my data is archival data that never changes. Ideally, my sync app would only expend resources keeping a focused set of files that I’m actively working on in sync. With odrive, only areas that you’ve browsed to before are synchronized. Everything else is out-of-sight-out-of-mind, hidden behind a virtual folder. The ability to expand some folders and keep others as virtual folders allows a user to control the surface area of sync for performance reasons. Tunnel vision can be good.
Handling Special Cases
When your data set becomes large enough, there are always difficult files for sync to process — whether they are large or frequently updated files, cross-linked files, “package” files (logical bundles of files), and the like. Fortunately, odrive provides granular control options so you can shape what’s downloaded locally or virtualized, or even temporarily pause sync until activity cools down. A command line interface can be used for more serious scripting and automation around special cases.
Integration Secret Sauce
There’s also a lot of glue technology needed to make an app that works seamlessly between storage providers. Every provider is different: rate limits, size limits, transfer orchestration, metadata formatting, error conditions… you name it. I want all of these differences to be totally transparent to me so that I can work with any storage in a common, predictable way. There’s a lot of hidden, underappreciated magic in odrive that comes from having hundreds of thousands of users using our sync over the past few years.
Cost: FREE
Did I mention that odrive was free? There’s a paid Premium plan for power users… you can tune sync with a custom exclusion list or get additional universal storage capabilities such as backup or zero knowledge encryption for any storage, and more. But full bidirectional sync with unlimited storage accounts and the ability to install on unlimited desktops, VMs, and other machines is completely free!
So… are you ready to try odrive?
Signing up is easy. You can choose from a variety of sign-in providers, connect your storage accounts, and then install the desktop sync app. Get started today!
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