When given the option of setting up oDrive Storage, it looks like all the options are remote/external/cloud type devices. How about using a locally attached external HD? Is it possible to designate either an entire ext HD, or a portion of such an attached ext HD (a folder or a dedicated partition) for this purpose? I don’t see any “Storage” option suggesting this is supported…
Hi @odrive9,
Are you wanting to make storage on your computer (like an external HD) available as storage that you can access from remote locations using odrive?
No. No remote-locations-access to this intended locally attached oDrive HDD storage space.
Only access by the locally-attached PC.
Hi @odrive9,
What would be the purpose of using odrive for this since you can already access the drive on the local machine?
Would this be to use as a “backup to odrive” target? Something else?
Well… there’s a big difference in speed between the two devices. The primary “hd” on the PC is a NVMe ssd-type device that’s at least 100x faster than the usb3.0 connected secondary device (that I’d like to make an oDrive storage-like device). Despite the relative slowness of this attached secondary, it’s also probably at least 100x faster than any network cloud drive (that we’re more usually using as “oDrive Storage” devices).
So… this new usb3.0 5T slower device is more appropriate for much of my lesser-used content that’s now sitting within my C: drive… I have a particular historical/legacy way of sorting content, and much of it (not all of it) is on my C: drive. If I could use oDrive to preserve this old/familiar drive/folder file locations - but actually move the real file over to the slower attached device (just keeping the empty/notational oDrive sync dot cloud file instead… that’s a good space save on my fast (expensive storage) NVMe device.
For stuff I’m really not looking at too often (like Xmas holiday movies and music after the holidays), maybe I’ll even detach the local usb3 device and stick it in the drawer till next December… while maintaining all the oDrive dot cloud reference files on my always attached NVMe device.
One challenge here is that I probably need to fix a letter to any such usb3 hd that I plug and unplug (as opposed to always leaving attached)… if on a subsequent replug the system assigns a different letter to the drive… this may throw off all the oDrive dot cloud files referencing the original drive letter…
So my request is starting to get complicated… I can either just leave the usb3 hd always attached… or manually control/assure that the assigned drive letter is reserved for this device and reassigned to it on subsequent replugs… I can do this…
But can oDrive handle anything like this?
Hi @odrive9,
Thanks for the additional information. I think I understand. It sounds like you basically want to use odrive to create a local caching layer on your NVMe for your external drive. This is an interesting use case.
odrive expects some sort of “storage service” to sync to, so you could do this by using something like SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, or even the basic MinIO server (https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-quickstart-guide.html) to facilitate the client/server relationship that is needed.
Basically, setup up a simple server on your system that is pointing to your external drive and then link that to odrive. This external hard drive will then show up in your odrive folder as another link and be syncable.
This reminded me of a post from a while ago where another user was looking to sync two external drives to each other. Your use case is actually simpler than that, but along the same lines: Can I sync two local locations directly with odrive?
Let me know if you have any questions on the above.