Is it Possible to Save Directly to "The Cloud" Rather Than Saving it to your Hard Drive and Then Uploading it?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14513387

  •  17-01-2022
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Question

I would like to be able to save directly to a remote location (cloud storage.)

Example: You are programming in your IDE and want to upload it to "The Cloud" so you click File > Save As > select DropBox, SkyDrive, etc. > name the file. When you click Save, it uploads it the file.

This popped into my head and seemed like it would be a lot easier than the current ways. Is this method possible?

No correct solution

OTHER TIPS

You can do this with the apps provided by the storage providers. Dropbox, for example, offers an app which creates a monitored folder on your hard drive. Anything saved into this folder is synced to Dropbox.

It would be up to the service to give you a "drive" URL, which you would have to map to a virtual drive on your computer. I dont know of any storage providers which offer this.

Some programs can do that. MS Office, for example, can save straight to Sharepoint locations, together with full blown tree browsing.

Some network file exchange protocols are available in Windows (Linux, MacOS) as redirectors. That means that they present themselves to the userland programs as ordinary filesystems. SMB/CIFS is the prime example, although probably no one uses SMB over Internet as-is. FTP, even though folder browsing is supported in Explorer alongside regular folders, is not a filesystem. Sometimes you can channel SMB over Internet via an encrypted channel, like a VPN or SSH - this requires control over both client and server.

Some cloud storages expose an API that a program could use to browse to and save directly to the cloud. Dropbox and Google Drive work that way. Anyone can write a program that saves/loads to Dropbox, or browses files on Dropbox. But it has to be done explicitly - you're targeting Dropbox, not just any cloud storage.

Dropbox also provides a store-and-forward solution - you save to a designated local folder which is eventually synced up with Dropbox.

With a generic program (not written to be cloud-aware) and a generic cloud storage (incapable of emulating a filesystem), however, you're out of luck.

For sharing specifically sources over the 'Net, the preferred way to do that is with an online source control system. There are public Subversion repositories out there; most IDEs can talk to those. But the commit to SVN step is usually manual. A local folder is still involved; it's a save-then-upload by other name.

By the way, having your source location in the cloud would be a considerable performance penalty. Internet is fast these days, but still no match for a hard drive.

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