Google Storage – Storage Made Easy Blog

December 16, 2020

Solving the ‘Working From Home With Large Files Problem’

The shift from working from an office to working from home / remotely due to the pandemic looks like it is here to stay for many companies, even post pandemic. End users have had to cope with moving from being always connected via a high speed line to SMB shares to working across consumer broadband from B2B2C file services. Prospects and customers have helped us create a pretty clear picture of the problems this has caused them and below we outline the top three things that we have been told:

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December 2, 2020December 2, 2020

Using WinSCP to sync data to Amazon S3, Azure Blob and other Storage clouds over SFTP

As pre sales engineers there are often times when we need to enable a prospect or customer to connect to the Enterprise File Fabric based on their specific infrastructure and requirements, often impacted by security and architectural topologies.

Recently I had to enable a customer to be able to synchronise local data from a windows server. Normally I would install the File Fabric’s sync app for Windows but there was a security requirement that meant no new software could be installed on this server, it was locked down.

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March 23, 2020April 23, 2021

Securely working with multi-cloud data in Microsoft Teams using the File Fabric

This is a follow on from our similar blog post on integrating Slack with the File Fabric.

Microsoft Teams is an alternative to Slack that has gained a lot of traction particularly in the last couple of week because of the need for employees to work from home. We have had several requests of how the File Fabric can be used within Teams and this post outlines how this can be achieved.

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September 12, 2019October 11, 2019

Media Focus: Validating Media Asset Integrity

Organizations working with media assets often have a requirement to validate a file’s integrity.

Whether it is to detect if any corruption has occurred, through to establishing the security of a file transfer or ensuring that a file is fully formed, the Enterprise File Fabric is equipped to easily deal with media asset validation integrity.

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July 1, 2018July 12, 2018

File Fabric Feature Focus – CloudZip provides zipped downloads of folders

We recently rolled out a brand new feature that we would like to highlight, called CloudZip.

CloudZip enables users to download zipped copies of their folders in .zip, .tar, or .tar.gz formats.

Ito works for any of the on-premises or on-cloud endpoints that are mapped to a File Fabric Account.

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June 25, 2018June 25, 2018

File Fabric Feature Focus – Collaborating on the move using FileBox

The File Fabric has lots of hidden cool features that are very powerful and as a part of a new series of posts on File Fabric features we are going to kick off with a feature called ‘FileBox’.

FileBox is a feature that enables files to be emailed, from any standard email client, directly into any FileBox nominated folder, or shared team folder.

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March 28, 2017May 24, 2018

Doug On HIPAA

HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), sets the standard for protecting sensitive patient data. Any company that handles protected health information (PHI) must ensure that strict protocols and protective security measures are adhered to. But maintaining the HIPAA standards of security over electronic information can be difficult especially with outdated storage systems.

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March 22, 2017March 22, 2017

Doug on Data Governance

Data Governance policies play a key role in all organisations that handle digital information. Ensuring you have strong Data Governance policies is one thing, but how do you implement them? Being unable to implement them properly exposes your company to threats, whether they be internal, or external.

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March 14, 2017

Doug on Data: Delivering the Last Mile of Object Storage to End Users

Object Storage is the way forward for all your storage needs, it’s adaptable meaning it grows with your storage needs, it’s economical, being that you only pay for what you need, but it does also have a number of drawbacks. Object Storage is not easily accessible to end users, and often it lacks auditing controls, which can open your business up to a whole range of problems around security and governance of data.

So what do you do? Struggle on with Block storage that is often increasingly difficult to enlarge when your company grows? Or move to Object storage and struggle to keep control over your data?

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March 19, 2014

Using Midnight Commander to work with Amazon S3, OpenStack, DropBox, OneDrive and almost any other Cloud

Midnight Commander is probably the most popular command line file manager in the world, and certainly for Linux distros. Its design was initially inspired by the classic two pane interface that was found in Norton Commander which was a DOS file manager (for those who remember !).

One of the unsung features of the Midnight Commander (also available on other platforms including phones (I used to use this on my old Nokia N900) and windows and mac) is that it can connect to server over FTP.

This is interesting from a Storage Made Easy viewpoint as although SME providers a full suite of Linux tools, SME also provider protocol interoperability as part of its Cloud Gateway features. What is this I hear you ask ? Well, simply put, it enables files you have stored on public or private storage to be accessible over any of the protocols Storage Made Easy exposes ie FTP, FTPS, WebDav, S3, SFTP.

Midnight Commander supports the FTP protocol which makes it easy to get direct access to any storage that is added to a SME Account using the SME FTP cloud protocol adaptor. To do this:

Choose the Left or Right option
Choose FTP link
Enter connection to SME as follows:

username:password@storagemadeeasy.com

or if you are using the SME EU Server:

username:password@eu.storagemadeeasy.com

The net result is a very easy way to bring the cloud into the linux desktop integrated with tools you already know and use. This can be used with the SME Personal CLoud plan, Business Team, and on-site enterprise editions of the product.

February 28, 2014

New Folder Sharing feature for team users

We have implemented a new folder sharing feature for Business Cloud / on-site Enterprise File Share and Sync Users. It simply provides the ability to share folders and sub-folders of files with external companies or other users who can receive the link, enter the password and gain access to the files without the need for an SME Account.

The video below shows the feature in action.

January 6, 2014January 16, 2015

Accessing OpenStack, RackSpace, Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox + more using Storage Made Easy and Transmit for Mac

If you have come across this post whilst researching how to access other storage clouds from Transmit then have a look at our Getting Started Guide to show you how you can register for a free account and get on with mapping your chosen Storage Cloud to the SME Cloud Gateway. When you are ready you can register for a free account here.

As many of you who use it know, CloudDav, from SME adds a WebDav layer over any Cloud, even if the underlying clouds do not support WebDav. SME does no however allow the native Mac WebDav client to connect direct because the performance of the native Mac WebDav client is notoriously abysmal for those with large amounts of files.

You can however choose to use other Mac clients to connect to the Cloud Providers that you have mapped to the SME Gateway. We highlighted Forklift as such a client in a prior post, and you can also choose to use Transmit from Panic.

Once you have CloudDav enabled you can choose to access your clouds, mapped via the SME Gateway, through Transmit. First choose to connect over WebDav as in the screenshot below:

You can then choose to connect directly inside of Transmit or as a Virtual Drive that will appear in Finder.

Transmit also has a very nice sync feature that will sync between folder structures. In this way you can sync files with Transmit and SME from different Cloud Storage Providers to your desktop.

Initial view before Sync

The Sync screen after choosing Sync

The Sync Simulation

SME CloudDav is available with every account, even free accounts, although on free accounts it is restricted to 150MB of use per month. The CloudDav protocol Adaptor is just one of the protocol adaptors that SME provides, the others being FTP, SFTP and a compatible S3 API. All protocol adaptors are available in the Storage Made Easy Enterprise edition as part of the Cloud Gateway which the SME Enterprise File Share and Sync is built upon.