How to use Nextcloud files on my computer desktop but not use up space on my computer

Hello Forums,

I apologize if this has been asked before but I wasn’t able to find the right search terms to see if my question has already been asked.

I’ve setup Nextcloud for our small office and our employees use it primarily from the webpage. But I have a usecase where I would like to use the Desktop app so we can have access to the files on Nextcloud from Windows Explorer…but I don’t want to have to download all files to the desktop computer and take up space on this computer. I’d like to have it where the files are on Nextcloud but when the employee wants to use a file, it gets opened from Nextcloud and can be saved back to Nextcloud if changes occur. Basically I want the files to still stay on Nextcloud, be seen from Windows Explorer, available to be used/modified and resaved back to Nextcloud without leaving the file behind on the computer and without taking up space on the computer…all space used is on Nextcloud.

Not sure if I’m explaining myself well enough but hopefully you get the idea of what I’m trying to do.

Thank you in advance for any advice you can provide for me.

I did some better searching and found my answer. Virtual Drive is what I’m looking for! But sadly I read that it’s very buggy and not under active development to get it fixed. Or it’s taking a long time to fix maybe.

If you want you can connect to your nextcloud with a webdav network drive. It’s quite slower than with the nextcloud client but it don’t use disk space.

The url is like this :
https://nextcloudurl.com/remote.php/dav/
Then username and password

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Thank you @Nemskiller for this suggestion!