

Access Dropbox as a network drive on Mac and Windows - hemancuso
http://blog.expandrive.com/2013/05/14/introducing-expandrive-3-dropbox-rackspace-openstack-webdav-dreamobjects-and-more/

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rolleiflex
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.

~~~
igul222
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.

~~~
strudelfish
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.

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hemancuso
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.

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

Any word on this? :)

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

~~~
wfunction
> 4-8 weeks

I think you mean 6-8 weeks.

<http://sixtoeightweeks.com/>

------
vinkelhake
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!

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jason_slack
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.

------
mrich
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!

~~~
kayoone
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.

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

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

------
peatfreak
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?

~~~
SG-
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.

------
yareally
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.

~~~
hemancuso
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.

~~~
yareally
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.

~~~
yareally
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.

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riobard
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!

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

<http://www.syncovery.com/>

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huhtenberg
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 :)

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

