[Owncloud] Mounting External Storage

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 21.02.2012, at 10:16, Arthur Schiwon <blizzz at owncloud.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday 21 February 2012 10:04:49 Klaas Freitag wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Agree

Sure. But keep in mind that not everybody is using the webinterface. If a user using WebDAV, the Mobile Client or the Desktop Syncing Client the user has no idea where a file comes from or where it is physically stored. There is also no obvious way to move it around between different locations.
If I mount my work ownCloud into my private ownCloud I would prefer to have this clearly separated and not mixed together.
But perhaps thats only me :-)


> 
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> I like this idea. In the end, wouldn't we follow the ideas of Nepomuk in a 
> certain way?

Absolutely. Thats definitely the goal but we probably need a few more month for that :-)


>>> 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
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Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org