# Cloud Storage?



## House (Mar 29, 2014)

Hey all,

New to FreeBSD, and I just made the switch.  Only I'm wondering, can someone assist me with cloud storage?  On my main OS I use google drive, is that available to use on FreeBSD?  Or do I have to use another?  If so, which?

Thanks!


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## trh411 (Mar 29, 2014)

House said:
			
		

> Hey all,
> 
> New to FreeBSD, and I just made the switch.  Only I'm wondering, can someone assist me with cloud storage?  On my main OS I use google drive, is that available to use on FreeBSD?  Or do I have to use another?  If so, which?
> 
> Thanks!


Google Drive is available via the www/chromium or www/firefox browsers on FreeBSD. There is no Google Drive (desktop) client for FreeBSD. Google has been working on a Drive client for Linux, that could perhaps be ported to FreeBSD, but that has been in a perpetual Beta state for the past couple of years. I find I can do everything I need with Google Drive via the browser. Your needs may be different.


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## mpokie (Aug 5, 2022)

I am new here. In Linux, nautilus offered the option of mounting google drive (so I heard), what about with FreeBSD


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## rsronin (Aug 5, 2022)

You could try: https://rclone.org/

Available in ports: net/rclone/


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## ralphbsz (Aug 5, 2022)

mpokie said:


> I am new here. In Linux, nautilus offered the option of mounting google drive (so I heard), what about with FreeBSD


Yes, there are "adapters" that allow one to make various cloud storage solutions (be it Amazon S3, Google drive, Azure Storage, or GCS) look like a file system to an OS, or to a local file browser (such as Nautilus). Matter-of-fact, I have one of those adapters on my daily driver machine (which is MacOS). I know that they exist for Windows and Mac as supported options; there are some amateur-hacked solutions for Linux, and to my knowledge nothing for FreeBSD. But one has to be very careful using those, because the semantics of cloud storage is significantly different from the semantics of files in a POSIX file system. For example, files can't be modified in place (typically only uploaded, sometimes appended to); and the performance of "writing" and "reading" files is so different from normal file systems that common workflows become laughable.

In my experience, the low-friction high-satisfaction way of using cloud storage solutions such as Google Drive is to stay within the web browser environment, and perform operations such as editing and viewing files right in there. For example, if the file is a rich-format text document, just use a cloud-based word processor (such as Office365 or Google Docs) for writing, printing and distributing the file. If the file is actually a binary blob (which you don't intend to read or modify in the cloud), then use either web- or CLI-based upload/download tools.

Another warning: There are two fundamentally different kinds of storage solutions in the cloud. One is intended for storing documents (including spreadsheets and presentations), photos and videos, and similar files, and they have an interface that resembles a file browser. Google Drive is in this category. The other are object storage solutions, where users upload and download objects, with focus on storing them, not on operating on them; Amazon S3 is more in the latter category. Files used for web serving tend to straddle that boundary.


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