Network Storage/Multiple Users

I Have a Question
1

Hello hello all,

I am new to odrive. After having too many hard drives fail on me over the years, I have decided to take all my backups to the cloud so I never have to worry about losing or recovering data. Also, the features of this system solve so many of my other wishes/problems/desires.We wanted some input on an idea/guidance for a possible workaround to some network drive/multiple users problem, at least until they’re officially worked out.

A breakdown of our situation:
We primarily use Amazon Cloud now to store our data, and there are two users in our family that share this storage.

We each have our own MacBook Pro, and we share an iMac at home, each with our own user accounts, and a third user account we call ‘HomeShare’ that we use essentially as a server. The HomeShare account is set to automatically start up when the computer starts up, and is left as an always-on account. It runs various things such as a Plex server, some autoRSS downloaders, and a few other low overhead things.

The iMac has an SSD that has the OS and User accounts/profiles, and it also has a 2TB HDD that we use to share files/media, backup large data, and for the Plex server. (Think network storage, but without the network, it’s a second drive located internally.)

Here’s where we are at: We each want to be able to have our own personal data folders that we sync to our user accounts on both the iMac and our laptops, and we also want access to the network drive in case we want to access some of the data from cold storage.

Our personal laptops are no problem, we can download the software and only choose to sync our individual folders, unless we specifically wanted to navigate to a specific file in the backup space. No multiple user/networked storage problem here.

The issue we have is with regard to the shared iMac. With the 2TB drive, we have the space to keep our shared files/media so that we don’t have to download them every time. (The throughput is excruciatingly slow.) However, with multiple user accounts on the computer, we know that we cannot currently each have our user profiles sync to the same networked drive. I understand that syncing with networked drives is in the works, but without any information on when that would be available, we have a possible workaround that we would like some input on.

If on the HomeShare account we stored the odrive folder on the ‘networked’ 2TB drive, but then set the sync options to sync everything in the shared folder only, and sync nothing in the user folders. Then in each user account, we stored the odrive folder in the specific user profile (on the separate SSD) and set it to sync everything in the specific user folder and nothing in the other two folders.

Does anyone see a problem with this? Have any other ideas for a workaround?

I am assuming that there is not currently any way to choose which folders are visible. A local setting where I would have it show only my user profile and not the shared or the other user’s profile. (Feature Suggestion?)

Thanks for the time. Sorry for the novel written here, I wanted to err of the side of caution that more info is better than less.

2

Hi Scotty,
Thanks for all of the information. I am trying to mentally condense it down into a simple use case, so I may be over-simplifying here.

It sounds like you want keep what will essentially be a cache of your cloud storage data on the shared iMac 2TB disk. You want to be able to access this data locally, in an on-demand fashion. You can grab it from the cloud directly, but it would be more efficient for you to grab them from the local shared system “cache”, instead. Is that right?

I will assume its close enough, so I’ll continue with what I think could be a solution for you:
As you said, your individual systems can run the odrive desktop client normally, where syncing will mostly be against your person cloud data (as opposed to the more bulky shared data that you want to cache on the shared machine). As you said: no problem there.

On the shared machine you could setup odrive desktop to auto-sync the content you want, so that everything in that structure is always cached locally. odrive Agent could also be used here, but its more advanced, so I won’t go into that further at this point.

At this point you would have your personal machines setup to sync your personal content and the shared machine locally caching all of the “shared” content you want access to over the LAN.

If on-demand, progressive sync, LAN access to the shared data from your personal MB Pros is the goal, you could then setup SFTP links to the shared system using the local IP of the iMac. Each of your odrive accounts would link to the iMac over SFTP (which you can enable from System Preferences->Sharing->Remote Login), point it at the odrive folder that contains the data you want to access, and get the access you want.

I think that would do it. Again, let me know if I am over-simplifying, or missing something.