[Owncloud] Mounting External Storage

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 20.02.2012, at 22:11, Michael Gapczynski <mtgap at owncloud.com> wrote:

> 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.

Cool :-)


> 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.

Yes. Protocols that are better supported by the OS should be handled by the OS.
We could still try to do a mount command and see what happens :-)


> 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. 

Hmm. I would use the OS tool for protocols like FTP, S3 or SMB 

Stuff like Dropbox. Google Docs/Drive, and other user services should be handled on a user level.
So every user can mount their Google Docs and move their files around.

I don´t really know what you mean regarding the location of the files. Let´s say a user is using ownCloud and has already some files and folder uploaded. Than the users connect the ownCloud with an existing dropbox or Google Drive. Where do all the files show up that are already in dropbox or on Google? I think it is confusing if they all appear in the root directory. And what happens when a user has the same file or folder in ownCloud and dropbox?

For me it makes more sense to mount a dropbox account into a folder, for example /dropbox.  But perhaps thats only me :-)



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

Thats a good point. Mounting external filesystems is definitely an advanced option that shouldn´t be the first option on the settings page. :-)


Cheers
Frank



Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org