One is that WebDrive depends on an internet connection. With a price tag of $US40 a machine and less for bulk buys, it's a cost-effective solution with minimal support requirements. If you're operating a VPN just to give your staff secure remote file access, WebDrive could be all you really need. It only affects your drive space when you select and open a file.īecause it supports encrypted file transfers, WebDrive can substitute for a virtual private network (VPN) in many cases. Because WebDrive doesn't insist on downloading every file you might need, it plays nicely with skinny storage disks. A colleague wanted access to a library of terabytes of archived files on his MacBook Air with its 250GB hard drive. The installed Dropbox application downloads local copies of your files so you can work on them, and you need to decide which folders to sync and make sure that there's enough disk space to download to. For Dropbox files to appear just like they're on your hard drive, they have to be on your hard drive. But WebDrive just does it, no fuss.Įven though you can access all your online files and folders through your new drive, WebDrive works very differently from a synchronising tool like Dropbox. The alternatives are to shell out extra cash for a Dropbox for Business account, or to fiddle around with folder sharing, or to swap between Windows profiles each with their own account, or to use the clumsier browser interface for one account and the installed version for the other. First, it's by far the simplest way to access two Dropbox accounts from one computer. There are a few distinctly cool aspects to the way WebDrive works. On a Mac, the same drives could be added to your Finder favourites. H: could be a different Dropbox, and so on. G: might access Amazon's mighty S3 servers. On a Windows PC, what presents as the F: drive might really be a Dropbox account. WebDrive helps laptop users to expand their storage disks because it doesn't store all the files on your hard drive. In the old days, "online file server" meant an FTP server, typically a privately hosted machine that relied on a venerable internet protocol that's still widely used today.īut over the years, WebDrive has learned to talk to SharePoint, Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3 and OneDrive. WebDrive connects a Windows or Mac computer to an online file server, making it look like a connected hard drive with its own drive letter. As if to prove you can't keep a good app down, the 2016 release solved a new problem. Fifteen years ago, I lauded WebDrive from South River Technologies. It's good catching up with dependable old friends, and one of them turned up in my world this week.
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