Yes but not waiting 10 minutes to download the file before watching by streaming is not good.
Also many applications use byte ranges when editing files or scanning for metadata. A virtual block device could handle this without downloading the full file.
Nice, but ā¦
Uhm i donāt get it: Whereās the new superior feature between
Again simpler would be only mount the webDAV-Folders as Networkadress so no Drive Letter would be used. That comes with the restriction you canāt safe in simple dialogs and must move the files. Both previously mentioned ways are much more user-friendly for sure.
Maybe thereās really advantages like more reliable, faster, more stable ā¦
but i donāt get it ā¦ thereās no such information in these text. At the moment it looks for me more like marketing aka bubbles than real technical solution.
Probably somebody with a compare could enlighten me in these points.
The anouncement that this way is so superior that other solutions maybe will be dropped doesnāt sound promissinā for me, either.
In Windows, a mapped WebDAV resource does not support the features I described in my previous post. Windows will always download the file to a temp folder before giving it to the application.
Instead, if you want proper file handling, it is technically possible with a virtual drive that deals with the WebDAV connection transparently to Windows.
Webdav in windows donāt work well. You have a lot of issues like :
Slow performances (bandwidth really slow)
Problems with office files. You wonāt open this files in write mode if you have Office after 2010
You can avoid that with using paid Mountain Duck for exemple.
The Nextcloud Virtual Drive works like the Google File Stream.
You have a folder where you can see all you 10TB of Nextcloud files without having them on your PC. You can sync some folders if you want to like the normal Nextcloud sync client for desktop. If you loose internet connection you can still go in the folder and you will access only the files you already synced.
So itās identical with the old way over netdrive etc. i mentioned.
So itās ājustā a simpler and netcloud-specific solution.
// i donāt want talk down the challenges and work, itās not to underestimate. Just steamed down to one sentence.
Thanks for clarification.
That breaks pretty much every app that requires a simple directory structure synced locally.
@alfred , sure thatās why i stated as third way, the lesser nice solution. But there are other pros and cons. Nobody negoates or doubts this. therefore also in italics.
The point was the ānewā solution does exactly the same as the old ones. (the points in bold). Itās the same in a simpler manner.
As a first glance yes Dokan does the first point.
But after itās another world 
.
And for free the NC virtual drive client will give users nice feature and will compete with the Gdrive File Stream client.
now itās getting interesting. Why itās another world?
What makes development new or different / better?
The old netdrive is also for free.
//Thatās the interesting points i asked for.
And what does that have to do with the American continent (Icon)? 
What do you call Netdrive is it a software of just a network drive letter as Y: ?
as i stated before.
Netdrive is a small piece of software (till 1.3.4 Freeware). I call the network drive a network drive.
Netdrive donāt do local syncing. When you lost internet connection you can access files
Dokan doesnāt either. So whereās the point?
With this logic in mind: i could also just mount the folder with "subst %DRIVELETTER% %PATHTOFOLDER% ". And now i have a Drive with synced files. That cannot be the point. This has nothing to do with the mapping of a network drive.
And i said before, i donāt want to make the solution bad (nice and easy needs to be) , i ask for the announced advantages over the existing ones with the new solution.
I tested it and yes it does
whatās the current state of this very interesting project, esp. on Mac and Linux?
Didnāt find any news after the first announcement and only see discussion here until April.
Would be sad to see this project being abandoned, was there any decision on its future?
I saw someone commenting that :
They finally Ā« stole Ā» the Owncloud implementation of the Virtual Drive. A fork has been made.
Helas i canāt confirm that.
You should go into the github of the nexcloud/desktop repository and look into the virtual drive branch.
Does anyone knows anything on this project?
I desperately tried to follow every thread here and on github, but no real official statement on that in 2 years (!).
It has been commented to death on the nextcloud forums and addressed multiple time on github with users proposing to pay for that development.
But except of tons of recommandations and suppositions by various users, no real ETA or official statement has been made since that ominous annoucement.
Fact is that after two years since the initial announcement all of the other big and not so big cloud provider offer this kind of solution except NC.
Iām sorry but this is frustating as a user and Iām wondering how nextcloud can claim to be the most popular cloud file synching solution provider.
I guess that with the pivot to transform nextcloud into a hub where the users are supposed to work more using your webbrowser than their file browser the attention to add such essentials improvement to the desktop-client is lowered.
This development on that essential functionality is very saddening.
Iām moving back to owncloud.
from er-vin:
This is still under work. Unlikely to be tagged stable this year, aiming at Q1 or Q2 next year.
Thanks, i also saw that phrase in one of numerous github issues.
And thatās what I mean that the com is saddening about this dev.
No real statement for a year.
I mean, alone in this forum post where it has been officially announced, there are up to today 238 answers nearly 30k views and not one official reply or post since september last year.
I would also like to see some news about this topic.
Currently testing nextcloud, I m struggling with this client sync on my mac. Itās eating my local disc space when I would like to only select what I want to be downloaded and work on it and resync while still having the possibility to see all folders and files.
Isnāt it better to have it loaded as an external/server drive rather than a local drive?
Maybe I m losing the point or somehting.
But for me having a cloud that is eating space on all my workstation isnāt a cloudā¦