How do Web-storage services (dropbox, skydrive etc) make users data mappable to a network drive?

Question

What technology do they use? Is it just that my data is literally stored in a folder on their servers and then hosted as a network share (with auth)?

I would think that the files would have to be abstracted somehow, stored in .dat files or distributed across multiple machines for redundancy, and that this would make simply sharing it via windows network share services wouldn't work.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It looks like SkyDrive at least is using WebDAV. The other services are probably doing something very similar. A Google search for "SkyDrive WebDAV" turns up many articles similar to this one. And it looks like Windows Explorer natively supports WebDAV connections for mapping a drive.