Multiple Cloud Storage Manager: odrive

Main screen
Sign in screen

The odrive does not have a sign up page. Instead, we can sign up using one of our email accounts or our Facebook account. Once we enter our credentials (we chose the gmail account), we are asked to create an odrive account. This account is not used to log in to odrive, it is a merely a way for odrive to identity us.

There is no link to the Privacy Policy at the main page. We found one when we logged in, but it did not say anything about how they handle the tokens that they receive from the cloud services. This is what we found about storing content:

We don’t actually store any of your content. Your content is stored on the Third Party Sources you have already chosen to store your content. We simply provide you access to the content.

Interestingly, in our profile page we found two links: One will expire our sessions and logs out from the clients, and the second link will close our account.

Easy of use

Since we used our gmail address to Sign up, the Google Drive service was already added in the list of linked cloud accounts.

Account actions

At the right end of an account line there is a down arrow. We click on it and we get a menu with two options: Edit and Unlink. The edit option displays a dialog to change the name that is given to that account.

Add an account

We connect to more services by clicking on the “+ Link Storage” button. The process is straight forward, and we can also add more than one accounts from the same cloud service.

Browsing

We browse an account by clicking on it. A new page is loaded with the contents of that account. This process is repeated for browsing folders. At the right end of each file/folder there is a down arrow. We click on it to Delete, Rename or Share that item.

Transferring

We can not transfer files/folder from one account to another. Moreover, we can not transfer files from one folder to another folder on the same account. We can only create new folders and upload local files.

Sharing

Share folder / file

We share a folder or file by clicking on the Share button (Click on the down arrow, at the right end). The file is then uploaded to their server, and we are presented with a link. In the sharing dialog we can set an expiration period for the link and a password. The password will not be used to encrypt the files. Instead, it is used to protect the access to that link.

Sharing options

It is a really interesting that we can control the files / folders that we have shared. We can delete them, modify the expiration period and set a password.

Efficiency

We can mainly use odrive to browse our cloud accounts. It has a limited capability when it comes to file/folder transferring, as it allows us to only upload local files. Still, odrive has a desktop version, both for Windows and Mac. We can use that desktop version to transfer files, like we do with the other folders that we have on our computer.

odrive also has a fairly large selection of cloud services:

  • 4shared
  • ADrive
  • Amazon Cloud Drive
  • Amazon S3
  • B2 Cloud Storage
  • Box
  • Dropbox
  • Google Drive
  • HiDrive
  • OneDrive
  • WebDav
  • Yandex Disk

Cost

We can use the free version to browse our accounts. There is a Premium version which costs $8.25 per month, but that version is useful only to those users who wish to sync their files / folders. Namely, we sync the local version of our files / folders with the cloud version.

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