[Owncloud] Mounting External Storage

[Michael Gapczynski]

I've been thinking about mounting external storage to ownCloud and I've had a 
few discussions with Robin about it. Now I'm looking for some feedback from 
the community.

The general idea is to add support for mounting FTP and SMB to use as storage. 
Writing a backend with PHP is possible for these, but they won't perform as 
well as the native OS implementations. I think the best solution would be to 
recommend to sys admins to mount natively and provide a fallback to a PHP 
backend if this isn't possible.

The other thing I need feedback on is deciding if normal users can mount 
external storage. I see the need for enabling users to link ownCloud to 
services such as Dropbox, and Google Docs (Google Drive), but I'm not sure if 
FTP and SMB should fit in with these. I'm also debating what is the best way 
to integrate these into the filesystem. The simple way would be to mount it as 
a directory and each service would be self contained. However, I can also 
invision having the files from Dropbox and Google Docs showing up in the root 
of the filesystem with an indicator of their respective external locations. 
During the upload or file creation process the user would be presented with a 
choice of where to store the file. This feels more natural to me than a 
directory system and could prevent problems with locating files. 

My main concern is creating a confusing environment for users with so many 
options for adding storage and a cluttered filesystem. Any thoughts? 


Michael