Read from cloud without syncing (Windows 10)

Hi folks!

Context:
I am a techy music producer with a previous files sharing challenge. I have multiple computers on which I make music. I have one hard drive with all my audio and plugins files and was fed up to unplug and replug that drive so I decided to work with clouds. My goal: have all my audio and plugin files on my nextcloud. Read the files and edit the files on my cloud without necessarily syncing those files.

Question:
How would you configure the Windows client to do so?

Thanks in advance for your help and huge thank you to all the nextcloud devs. You guys revolutionized the data clouds. Ill contribute as much as I can.

and there are a lot of other webdav clients for windows. (more or less working well.)

1 Like

yup. I think thats exactly what I need. Cool stuff. Thank you. I tried it but it was extremely slow. Any tips on how to get the best performances? Internet connections… computer, type of drives I guess… :S

Just another webdav client:

yes. that’s a good start to discuss performance issues.

but maybe you are just looking for a fileserver (sysnology, qnap), maybe you don’t need any feature nextcloud offers on top of a simple fileserver.

for this we would need more details about your use case.

Its not that bad for the small projects but for the bigger ones, its a bit slow. I wanted to setup nextcloud cause on some PCs I need to access the same files but I dont necessarily have my SSH key to use Winscp and SFTP for example.

Use case:

  • Open a music project hosted on that file server
  • Let the program locate the needed files on the file server (usually .dll and .wav files)

and thats about it. will try different clients that you mentioned to see if I can get better performance with the actual setup. If not, I may look into sysnology and qnap. Thanks again

EDIT:

Windows embedded Webdav clients:
So, I tested mapping drive and folders into FLstudio and opening small projects with the “embedded” webdav client from win 7 and win 10.

  • On windows 7, it took a looong time to open a project. but it was working.
  • On windows 10 it was about to take a long time too but eventually, explorer just crashed.

I tried a second time and got a green screen with an error message I dont remember. i wanted to share so people with similar use case are aware of what kind of issues they might face. Also, it was impossible for me to extract zipped files.

RaiDrive
Really easy to set up, seems to work fine so far, didn’t try relogging in Windows sessions or rebooting to see if it will reconnect automatically. You can mount on whatever drive letter you want without too much effort. Zipped files extractions are working but extremely slow.

  • FLstudio drive and folders mapping: Passed
  • Opening FLstudio projects: :open_mouth: PASSED !!! (Speed was practically like usb drive)

Cons: Slow down the whole computer and explorer unless its the Windows update that happened at the same time I’ve installed RaiDrive