Cloud drives
A cloud drive makes a container in one of the customer's storage targets appear as a drive on a machine — S: in Explorer, a volume in Finder, a mount point on Linux. Files are fetched when opened and uploaded when saved, so a 2 TB bucket can sit on a laptop with a 256 GB disk.
Mount a drive #
- Agents → the machine → ⋮ → Cloud Drives → Add. Drives are configured from the console and pushed to the agent; nothing is set up on the machine itself.
- Choose the storage target and container (bucket, share, folder) to expose. One drive is one container; mount two containers as two drives.
- Drive name and letter (Windows) — the name is what Explorer shows. Tick Read-only for a reference share nobody should write to.
- Save. The drive appears on the machine within one check-in — a few seconds — and stays mounted across reboots. Unmount by deleting it from the same list.
The drive is mounted by the agent service and is visible to every user of the machine, with the storage target's credentials held by the agent — users never see a key. Restrict access with the container's own layout (one container per team) or mount it read-only.
Platforms #
| Platform | Driver | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 10/11, Server 2016+ | Dokany (user-mode filesystem) | Installed automatically by the agent installer. A drive letter of your choosing; Version history… on the context menu. |
| macOS 15+ | FSKit module inside Caryvane.app | The module runs as an app extension in the user's session, so the drive appears after the user logs in. Full Disk Access must be granted to the app. |
| Linux | FUSE 3 | Mounted under /mnt/caryvane/<name>; fuse3 is a package dependency. |
Any storage target can be mounted — S3 and compatibles, Azure Blob, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox, Egnyte, Google Drive, SFTP, FTP, SMB, a local folder — because the drive talks to the same provider layer a backup job does.
How it behaves #
Opening files #
Listing a folder asks the provider and caches the answer briefly, so browsing is quick. Opening a file fetches it into a local cache (C:\ProgramData\Aurawolf\cache\ on Windows) and reads from there; large files are read ahead in ranges, so a video starts playing before it has all arrived. The cache is bounded — 10 GB per agent by default, adjustable in the agent's Properties — and the least-recently-used files are evicted when it fills. What you have opened recently stays fast.
Saving files #
A save completes locally at once and the upload runs in the background; the tray icon shows the queue. If the machine goes offline the queue waits and resumes. Until the provider's listing catches up the drive answers from its own record of what was just written, so a file never disappears between save and upload.
Two machines, one file #
Writes are conditional: the upload succeeds only if the file has not changed at the provider since it was read. When two people edit the same file on two machines, the second to save keeps their work as a conflicted copy beside the original rather than silently overwriting the first. The provider's own locking (SharePoint check-out, for example) is respected where it exists.
Previous versions #
When the drive's storage keeps versions, Explorer's context menu on any file offers Version history…; see Restore data.
Limits worth knowing #
- Latency, not bandwidth, sets the feel. Every first open is a round trip to the provider; a folder of a thousand small files opened one by one will feel slower than one large file. Providers with slow listings (SFTP over a long link, Dropbox) show it most.
- Object stores have no real folders. On S3-style storage an empty folder is kept by a hidden
.keepmarker so it survives; the drive hides the marker. - Locking is per machine. Applications that rely on byte-range locks across machines (Access databases, some CAD file managers) should not share a live working file over a drive; use it for documents and media.
- Not a backup. A drive shows the live container. Deleting a file on the drive deletes it at the provider (versions, if on, keep the old copy). Back the container up with a job as well.
When a drive does not appear #
The agent must be Online and enrolled as the agent the drive was configured for. On Windows check the Dokany driver is present (Add or Remove Programs → Dokan Library; the agent installs it on first mount and needs a reboot on some systems). On macOS the FSKit module needs the user logged in and Full Disk Access granted. On Linux check fusermount3 exists and the agent's journal. More in Troubleshooting.