I’m just starting to dig in the crazy world of cloud storage and I’m already a bit confused.
Basically, I have an amazon cloud drive account on which I stored all the content of my external hard-drive. I am a photographer so I need to be able to access my files on a regular basis via Lightroom which won’t go fetch files in the cloud so my idea is to work on my HDD but I want it synced with my amazon cloud to keep a constant, safe backup of my files.
My question is, can I put the odrive folder on my external HD and then put all my files in the odrive folder in order to have it synced automatically?
Hi @morganflame,
We do not officially support moving the whole odrive folder to an external drive. You can use “sync to odrive” to create a sync relationship between an external folder and a remote folder. This is a Premium feature and you can read more about it here: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/manage-sync#section-sync-external-folders
It sounds like you are looking for a traditional backup solution. odrive is currently a sync solution and not quite the same as traditional backup. Sync may be a bit heavy for what you want to do, although there are many folks who use it this way. I got into this in more detail in this post, if you are interested: Backup (one-way sync)
So, I’m experimenting right now with odrive and my amazon cloud stuff and it seems to behave quite exactly like what I would need.
First I moved the odrive folder to my external HD and now I’m moving the content of my external HD that is already backed up on Amazon and it seems that odrive is doing the synchronization just fine, recognizing files that are already on Amazon Drive and filling up what’s missing. After that, all I have to do is recreate my Lightroom catalog with the odrive folder and eventually I will even be able to unsync the local folder and the Amazon Drive Folder and I will have a backup that I can partially sync as needed in order for Lightroom to find the files. Also, correct me if I’m wrong but I believe the odrive folder is not a premium feature so if I’m correct it means it’s free and that would just be the cherry on the cake.
Also, in the future, I will just need to import my pictures from my memory card directly to the odrive folder and it will automatically backup the new files to Amazon Drive on the go and add it to my general backup which is already up there. Does it make any sense?
Hi @morganflame,
Moving the odrive folder is part of the free version. It is possible to move the odrive folder to an external drive, as you’ve seen. As mentioned above, we don’t officially support this or recommend it because it can cause adverse side-effects, like sync delays, additional CPU overhead, disk churn, etc. That being said, it is your system and you are free to do whatever you feel is best for your own use case.
For your pictures from the memory card, if you copy those to the odrive folder, they will be uploaded automatically.
I’ve been using it mainly as a backup solution. I start up automatic sync a couple of times a day. I’d prefer to have it running full time but want to back up my Outlook PST files for multiple mail accounts. These are constantly being updated, which is a nuisance for the odrive sync process. If I leave automatic sync on, it still works fine but results in a high quantity of useless network traffic. Some sort of selective odrive scheduling facility would be cool, but I’m doing fine in the meantime. I have about 1 TB stored on Amazon, mostly multimedia files. I could also use my copious Office365 Microsoft space although Amazon is unlimited.
Yes, that’s my idea more or less. Now I just backed 1+TB and it went ok. After that I won’t need to have sync turned on constantly. I think I found the solution I was looking for
Hi @AST,
Our recommendation is still the same on this one. The officially-supported way to map data to an external drive is using the “sync to odrive” feature, as stated in this post:
