Basic setup question - do I need the local Google Drive, OneDrive & iCloud apps installed when using odrive?

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I’ve been using odrive for a couple of years, but I’m building a new machine and want to make sure I get everything set up correctly for maximum efficiency.

On my current box I have the “apps” installed for google drive, onedrive, iCloud and Dropbox PLUS the onedrive client (because I got odrive after I had all those services installed). I only go to the local odrive folder to access two of the many accounts I have, the rest I access through the local Google drive folder. In other words, I haven’t doubled up on local disk usage by syncing the same accounts twice in two different folders (at least I don’t think I have).

On the new box, since I’m starting from scratch, wouldn’t it be best to install only the odrive client for maximum simplicity? In other words, do I need to install the apps from the various storage services again? If I ever want to share files with others from Google drive, I use the web interface, so no need to have any sort of local commands when I right-click on a file in the Windows file explorer.

I know this probably seems like a dumb question, but I want to have the cleanest solution possible on the new machine, and the way I have things now I’m always terrified that when I’m removing what I think are duplicate files in one of the accounts, I’m going to somehow delete the source/original.

Thanks in advance for your help!

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Hi @matt.nye ,
Thanks for reaching out. This is definitely not a dumb question!

odrive is intended to be a replacement for all of the other sync clients, letting you access all of your linked storage in one place.

Just to provide an example, I use 4 different systems daily (one Windows, one Linux, and two Macs), with about 120 different storage accounts linked and I only have odrive installed on each system.

The exception in the list of storage you provided above is that odrive doesn’t have an integration to iCloud yet. We have been waiting for them to provide a sufficient API for general access and management…

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Thanks Tony! So I guess my only question is: can I set the local folder for odrive and iCloud to the same path/folder? Or will that wreak havoc/confusion?

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Hi @matt.nye ,
What would be your goal for setting the iCloud to sync the odrive folder? Are you wanting to store all of your cloud storage in iCloud?

Yes, I think this would probably create a bit of a mess. icloud can have a somewhat similar placeholder offloading scheme which can create problems when odrive is looking at the same folder. This post has an example of that: