Standalone Drives

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Our native drives allow you to mount and interact with object storage as if it was a local disk. Browse and open remote files with any application. Use Windows File Explorer to drag and drop, move, rename and delete files and folders. Configurable cache for performance. Upload manager for non-blocking uploads. Support for large files and deep folder hierarchies. Drives can also be used in scripts and are accessible from the command prompt.

Drives are available for private and public clouds supporting:

• S3 and S3-Compatible Object Storage
• Google Cloud Storage
• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• OpenStack Swift Storage
• Rackspace Cloud Files

After providing the storage endpoint and account credentials the drive is ready to use as a native desktop Windows drive or Mac volume.

Use the File Explorer or Mac Finder to drag and drop, move, rename and delete objects as if they were files and folders. The drive transparently handles moving, copying and renaming of the underlying files and folders even if often the object storage does not support these operations directly.

Move multiple files or folders between local and cloud storage through drag and drop via the Windows File Explorer or Mac Finder.

Users can now browse and open files in cloud storage directly from their regular desktop applications such as Microsoft Office or LibreOffice. Easily access the drive via an application’s File Open or Save function.

The top level folders represent object storage buckets (or containers) which can be easily created and deleted through the drive.

Drives are accessed as regular network file-systems. They can be referenced in scripts and are accessible from the command prompt.

The drives are optimized for large and deep folder hierarchies. When folders are browsed only file metadata or stubs are downloaded. This information is cached for a configurable period. Files themselves are also cached when downloaded. Once files are created or modified the Upload Manager works in the background synchronizing them with cloud storage.

See also Object Storage Drive vs. Object Storage Explorer: The Case for Using Both

You are responsible for the cost of the storage services (such as Amazon S3) used by deploying this solution. This includes any Windows compute instances to which the drive is deployed and any ingress, egress, and storage fees for metadata and data accessed through the solution.

The S3 Drive uses the following service:

• Amazon S3 - Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Can I access the drive from other applications?

Yes, the drive will be available through an application’s Open File and Save functions.

Can I access the drive from a command prompt or terminal?

Yes, the drive can be accessed like a file system in this respect.

Does the drive cache?

Yes, the drive caches file content and folder metadata for performance. Cache settings can be managed under configuration settings.

Does the drive find new content that has been uploaded directly (not via the drive) to the object storage?

Yes, the drive will show latest content on the storage provider instance whether the content was uploaded through the drive or to the storage provider directly.

Why does the drive show 2TB available when I have unlimited cloud storage?

The drive shows the maximum space available of the drive used for the cache.

The installation process is simple and requires minimal configurations.

Latest system requirements at relnotes.

You must disable Antivirus scanning for the installation folder, cache and drive letter.

A reboot will be required.

Authentication is specific to the storage provider, typically an id and password. An endpoint can be provided for private clouds.

• Azure - Account name and either your primary or secondary key
• Google - Open the Cloud Storage Settings page in the Google Cloud Platform Console; Select “Interoperability”; If you have not set up interoperability before, click “Enable interoperability access”; Click “Create a new key”.
• IBM Cloud Object Storage - (IBM COS) Endpoint, Access key ID and secret access key. The endpoint must not include the bucket name.
• OpenStack Swift - User name, password and either Tenant Name or Tenant Id. Contact your provider for more information. The option “Use internal URLs when possible” is an optimization for Local Area Networks.
• Rackspace Files - User name and API key
• S3 - AWS Access key (access key ID and secret access key). The endpoint must not include the bucket name. To create an access key for AWS see Understanding and getting your AWS credentials. For AWS the access key will look like “AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE” and the secret access key like ““wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKE”.

Following the security principle of least privilege, we recommend that you use separate credentials for each end user. For the AWS Cloud for example this would mean an “IAM user” account for each end user. They should not be root users. They can be created within the same AWS Account or have separate accounts.

Where supported you should further restrict access to only the operations required by the drive. For example, with Amazon S3 you can use a custom IAM policy that limits access to those operations required by the drive. You should assign these permissions through groups and assign to users as needed. For example the group SME-Storage could be assigned the following policy:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:ListAllMyBuckets",
                "s3:AbortMultipartUpload",
                "s3:RestoreObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:DeleteObject",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:DeleteBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

To restrict the account's access to a specific bucket, you could use a policy like this:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:ListBucket"
            ],
            "Resource":"arn:aws:s3:::thisbucketonly"
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:DeleteObject",
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:AbortMultipartUpload",
                "s3:RestoreObject"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::thisbucketonly/*"
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "s3:ListAllMyBuckets",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Access functions and options from the icon in the system tray (for Windows).

• Browse S3 Drive - opens mapped drive in the Windows Explorer
• Refresh now - invalidates folder listings and file content that may be cached.
• Start/Stop Drive - starts or stops drive
• Manage uploads - view uploads that are in-progress or scheduled
• Settings - change configuration options

Access advanced configuration settings from the system tray. You can change when and were the drive is mounted, and the duration and behavior of the cache. Some drives have additional options.

• Start with Windows: Start automatically on login. Pending uploads will be preserved.
• DLO Segment Size: Maximum size of parts used uploading large objects
• Drive letter: The mapped drive letter.
• Folder refresh timeout: Expiration of directory listing from object storage. Override with the function Refresh Now. Default 15 minutes.
• Maximum parallel uploads: Number of files that can be concurrently uploaded. Default 3.
• Get last modified time header: Do not change. Default off.
• Delete files cached for more than [8 hours]: Remove files not accessed for a specific time period.
• Delete cached files larger than [50 MB] after upload: Do not keep large files in cache after they are uploaded.
• Delete cached files when Windows shuts down: Clear cache. Does not preserve pending uploads.
• File cache folder: You may change the location of the local cache.

The Connections Setting dialog is available from the Authentication and Settings pages. It allows the Internet Proxy settings for the Drive to be managed independently of the Windows Operating System.

For more information on how the drive works see troubleshooting.