[Owncloud] Mounting External Storage

[Klaas Freitag]

On 20.02.2012 23:21, Tom Needham wrote:
>> On 20.02.2012, at 22:11, Michael Gapczynski<mtgap at owncloud.com>  wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> I think that mounting all of the storage backends into the root folder might even be easier for the end user, if we can make the ui work well. If everything was mounted in folders /dropbox /google /ftp I think end users would get confused where their files were actually being stored and could loose track of things.
Thats right, unexperienced  users which we also like to see in ownCloud 
often do not understand the directory concept, especially not if they 
did not create the directory nor understand their name: One will 
understand a "Letters to Tina" folder way better than a suddenly 
appearing "FTP" directory.

Most users today have search centric behaviour, driven by google. Google 
does not have directories, you just searhch and find. Even if we store 
data in dirs and mount into directories (which we need for tech reasons 
I think) maybe we should think more in the direction of creating various 
views on the files structure. For example, an alternative to the current 
file-page of ownCloud could be a page with just a search field. If one 
enters "Tina" all files from the "Letters to Tina" dir are presented.
>
> Perhaps we could also enhance the idea of 'labelling' (or maybe better 'tagging') of files to make it easier to search for files (much like bookmarks). This would make it easy for example to show everything stored on dropbox, or everything that you are sharing...
Yes, tags are one of the search criteria often used.
>
> It's certainly an interesting topic :)
Yes, and one which is technically hard to tackle but one that really can 
make ownCloud even more exciting.

Klaas