Adding a WebDAV compatible Cloud Provider

Last updated on April 24, 2019.

Storage Made Easy can work with any RFC Compliant WebDAV Provider.

1 Step1: Choosing the WebDAV Provider

The first step is to choose to add the WebDAV provider to your SME Account either   as a first step on activation or later from the Cloud DashBoard which is accessible from the right sidebar after login to the website.

2 Step 2: Setting up the WebDAV Provider

Once you have chosen to add a WebDAV Cloud The WebDAV wizard will commence. You will need to enter the WebDAV details of the server. These include the correct URL for WebDAV and the port number.   You may not need to enter the WebDAV home path. This is dependent on whether you have root level access to the WebDAV resource after authentication or only to a folder or sub folder within the tree.   You should consult your WebDAV host with regards to this.

If you are using a home WebDAV Server then note that you must have a public IP address and you must have setup port forwarding on your router. Also note that sometimes Broadband connections can drop when not active. This is a common fault for not being able to connect to a home WebDAV server.

If you Require WebDAV access locally or within a corporate firewall and be able to expose access in a public/private type way using the Cloud File Server, you should consider our on-premise hybrid Cloud Appliance.

3 Step 3: Cloud Meta Sync

You can choose to sync in the background or just to start synchronisation. right there in the browser. The differences of each are:

  1. Foreground - this uses the browser to do the meta-sync and if the browser hangs or you exit it will stop. If you have a small amount of flies (under a few thousand) then this is a fairly quick option.
  2. BackGround - this is run as a scheduled Cloud task and will commence within a minute. You will be taken to a page where again you can monitor progress but if you exit the browser the meta sync will continue.

A meta sync merrily indexes information about your files, they do not move anywhere.

4 Note!

Note that we implement a strict WebDAV implementation and we note that many providers do not or do not provide quite the right response. It is possible for us to make exceptions for such providers, and we have done this over time, but if you come across a WebDAV provider that cannot be added, please contact us and we will see what we can do to add an exception for it so that it will work with our platform.

Also note that using a home server with WebDAV is not an optimum solution for large file transfers using our SaaS Service. From a locality perspective the Cloud Appliance and WebDav Server should be co-located for such a use case. If you have this use case you should consider our Cloud Appliance.

Rate Limiting

Some WebDAV servers may limit the rate at which it processes requests. This page: File Fabric Handling of Rate-Limiting Storage Providers explains how the File Fabric responds to rate limiting.