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SME now supports Amazon Cloud Drive

**Please note this is an old post – Amazon Cloud Drive is no longer supported

We’ve now added support for Amazon Cloud Drive as a Cloud Storage Provider that can be used with SMEStorage.

Amazon providers every Amazon customer, even new customers without purchases,  5 Gigabytes of online storage. Customers in the US, who have purchased at least one digital music album on Amazon get, 20 Gigabytes of extra space for the first year. Paid Storage plans start at 20 Gigabytes and go up to 1000 Gigabytes. Each Gigabyte costs $1 per year with no additional costs (ie. no data transfer rates that are normally charged with the use of storage such as Amazon S3).

Let step through adding the Amazon Cloud Drive to your account:

1. First sign up for a new Amazon Account. Even if you have an Amazon Account it can be worth separating your main Amazon account from your Storage Account as Amazon does not provider separate token authentication for Cloud Drive, so the details you use will be the same details you use to login into Amazon, and you may wish to keep these private.

2. Once registered you will be taken to the Cloud Drive home screen, but it is important that you at least attempt to upload a file so that you can agree to the Amazon Terms and Conditions of Cloud Drive (if you are interested, you can review the terms and condition here).

3. Once you have done this your Amazon Cloud Drive will be ready

4. You can now either choose to add the Amazon Cloud Drive to your existing SMEStorage Account (got to My Account->Providers tab and choose “Add new Provider‘ Link) or you can sign up for a new free SMEStorage account. In either case you will need to enter your Amazon Cloud Drive authentication details at the first step of the wizard.

5. After your authentication has been verified you will be required to sync your meta data to create your cloud view within SMEStorage.

6. Once this has completed your CloudDrive files will be mapped and accessible via SMEStorage.

7. If you use the files via our Web Portal then you get all the integrations that are available to all clients such as integration with Zoho office for editing office docs, with Google Viewer for viewing files, ScribD for viewing PDF files, and Picnik for editing images.

8. All other SMEStorage clients will also be able to use with the Amazon Cloud Drive. These include, our Firefox Plug-In, Chrome Extension Plug-In, iPhone/iPad client, Android client, BlackBerry client, Windows Cloud Tools + Virtual Drive, Mac Cloud Tools + virtual Drive, Linux Cloud Tools + Virtual Drive.

Some examples of Clients using the Cloud Drive can be seen below:

iPhone Client

Firefox Client

Mac Client


Free Windows Cloud Explorer

Windows Virtual Drive

UPDATE: This is an old Blog Post – Amazon now prevent access to Cloud Drive and it is no longer supported.

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Mac Cloud Drive beta 4 for Google Docs, S3, SkyDrive + other clouds released

We’ve just updated our Labs page with the beta 4 of our Mac Drive. This is a huge step forward in our goal of having a robust multi-cloud drive for the Mac OSX. We now have implemented a cache to keep Finder happy when files are first copied or dropped there, and we add them to a queue so that they are uploaded in the background. If you shut down then the files resume next time you fire up the laptop and the drive is mounted

We also catch queueing operations so we can deal with renames and deletes, and we also now support the opening of encrypted files as well as letting you get a URL for a file using Finder Service actions. You can watch the video below to get more of a feel for what the drive does.


Mac Cloud Drive Beta 4 for Google Docs, S3, SkyDrive other Clouds

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Guide to creating a multi-OS shared Linux Cloud Drive with SAMBA using The File Fabric

The File Fabric provides a Linux cloud drive that can be mounted on a file system and then used as a normal drive. Samba allows file and print sharing between computers running Windows and computers running Unix. Samba sets up network shares for chosen Unix directories (including all contained subdirectories). These appear to Microsoft Windows users as normal Windows folders accessible via the network.

A File Fabric Cloud Drive can be set up as a shared drive on a Linux file server allowing you to share it amongst many users on your network. This is useful if you want to share cloud resources from a single user account across many users.

Here is a step by step guide to configuring Samba and the File Fabric Linux drive. First, make sure you have installed Samba. Samba is included with most of the Linux distributions. For this we are using CentOS 5.5.

1. Make a backup of your /etc/samba/smb.conf file and then edit the smb.conf file (Make sure the workgroup is the same as the workgroup windows machines belong to.). It should have the following:

[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
encrypt passwords = yes
[smedrive]
comment = smedrive mount
path = /export/sme
read only = no

For further information on Samba configuration file please see http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/ch06.html

2. The File Fabric Linux drive uses the open-source Fuse code and the out-of-the-box settings do not allow sharing in this manner. Therefore we need to  create a file /etc/fuse.conf with the following one line content and after we do that the machine needs to be rebooted for it to take effect.

user_allow_other

For further information on Fuse please see http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/fuse/index.php?title=Fuse.conf

3. Create the directory where we will mount the drive:
# mkdir -p /export/sme
# chmod 1777 /export/sme

4. Add linux and samba users:
# groupadd smeuser
# useradd -m -n -ppassword -gsmeuser smeuser
# smbpasswd -a smeuser

New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
Added user smeuser.
#
5. In the File Fabric Client select File →Advanced and check share your drive check box. Mount the the File Fabric Linux drive make sure the mount folder is /export/sme. By default the File Fabric drive mounts with the “allow_other” option enabled.

6. Start the samba services

# service smb start

Starting SMB services:                                     [  OK  ]

Starting NMB services:                                     [  OK  ]

#

7. Test the samba services.

8. If everything has gone correctly so far you can now mount the shared drive in windows and from the Finder in Mac OSX (using ‘Connect to Server->Go’) and any platform that supports SMB protocol

For windows make sure the workgroup is the same as defined in smb.conf file and you can ping the Linux machine.

9) Open a command prompt and run the command

net use t: file://localhost/smb/::172.16.195.161:smedrive /user:smeuser password

10. Open explorer you will see the drive appear in explorer

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SME add support for Mezeo Personal Cloud Storage

** This is an old post and Mezeo is no longer active

We’ve just added Mezeo Personal Cloud Storage to the list of cloud providers that we support. This means you can use SMEStorage as a gateway to your Mezeo account and access your data via our Windows Cloud Desktop tools, our Linux and Mac virtual drives (currently in beta) and also through the iPhone and BlackBerry cellular devices. You can also take advantage of our iPad application which is being submitted to Apple in the next few days, and of course all our other integrations, such as Firefox, Facebook, WordPress etc.

If you are using Mezeo On-Premise and wish to be able to use our Data Access platform with Mezeo, that include  our unique collaboration and Work Portal features that are available with our Organisation Cloud offering,  then please contact us.

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Mac Cloud Drive updated to beta 3

We’ve updated the Mac Cloud Drive to beta 3. This resolve an issue relating to Google Docs and Skydrive. When these two cloud providers are first sync’d it is not possible to know the file size. After the files are first downloaded through the SMEStorage platform the file size is discovered and available thereafter. This does not cause problems in other clients but the Mac file system has a problem with downloading what appears to be zero sized files.

We have therefore introduced a fix in this build that enable any zero length files to be downloaded within the file system when using the Virtual Drive. The Mac Drive is available for download on our Labs page.

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How to access Google Docs, S3, SkyDrive and more from a cloud drive on your Mac

We recently released beta two of our FUSE based Cloud Drive for the Mac. The drive was developed on Snow Leopard but seems to work fine under Leopard also.

The drive enables you to use the Cloud Accounts that you access via the SMEStorage Cloud Gateway directly on your Mac throughFinder. The drive is installed as a Preferences Pane within the Mac System Preferences. Once mounted there is a SME icon that appears in the taskbar that turns red or green depending whether data is being uploaded or downloaded. The icon also lets you mount/ unmount the drive and refresh the view.

You can also access the files directly from Terminal using ‘/Volume/SMEFileSystemRW’. We notice in a forum post that someone had even tried using rsync with their Googe Docs account which is pretty neat.

The drive is now starting to become more stable as we would expect from a beta 2 release. We are now going to concentrate on 3 main things for the drive: Performance, Encryption support, and Sync (much in the same way DropBox support sync).

You can watch a short video below of the drive in action:

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Mac Cloud Storage Virtual Drive Update

We continue to work on the Mac Virtual Drive. We know that we are a little behind on this as to when we wanted to release it but you have probably seen from many of the recent blog posts that we have been working on a lot of things in Parallel !

We hope to be in a position to release the first beta towards the end of next week on our site, so keep checking back for this. It will be on our labs page.

In the meantime there are some screenshots below to show progress:

VirtualDrive

VirtualDrive2

VirtualDrive3

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Mac & Linux virtual cloud drive due in New Year

We have some really exciting things lined up for the New Year, one of which is the re-launch of the site with a new look and feel, and the other is some fantastic new ways you can use SMEStorage. We are currently mid way through developing out Mac and Linux virtual drives and expect both of them to be available before the end of January.

These virtual drives will map onto your underlying clouds just as the windows version does. This will mean that you can double click into the virtual drive and access up to 10 different storage clouds depending on your package.

A screenshot of the Mac version in use can be seen below:

mac-vdrive-sshot

In the meantime all that remains is to wish you all a happy festive season and thanks for your support over 2009 .

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