Personal drives: who signs in, where, and for how long
A machine's drives are the same for everyone who sits at it. A personal drive belongs to a person — a home folder, a department share — and appears only after that person signs in to Caryvane Drive on the machine, in their own Windows session or macOS login. Machine drives never depend on anyone signing in; personal drives are added on top.
1. The people #
Drive Users is the list of people who may sign in for drives. They are not console users: a drive user never sees the console, and your staff never appear in a customer's drive user list. Add a person under the right customer, choose how they may sign in (Microsoft 365, Google, or a Caryvane password with an optional one-time code), and give them one or more drives: a storage connection, an optional folder beneath it, a name, and a preferred drive letter.
The same person signs in on a phone (the Caryvane Drive app) and on a PC or Mac with the same account; a drive marked Allow on phones is offered on both, one that is not stays desktop-only.
2. The machine's drive sign-in policy #
Whether a machine offers sign-in at all, and how it behaves, is a policy set on the customer and overridable per machine. Customers → ⋮ → Drive sign-in… sets the default for every machine of that customer; Agents → ⋮ → Drive sign-in… sets one machine's own. Each dialog shows the setting in force and where it came from — Inherited from Henderson Ltd, or Set on this machine — and a switch to follow the level above instead.
Four presets cover almost every machine; the values underneath can be adjusted:
| Preset | When people sign in | Where the sign-in is kept | Cached files | Ask again |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personal device | Stays signed in | The Windows user's credential store / the Mac login Keychain | Kept | After 30 days |
| Shared device | Each logon | In memory for that logon | Purged on sign-out | Every logon |
| High security | Each logon | Not kept at all | Purged on sign-out | Every logon |
| Optional | Only if they choose to | In memory for that logon | Purged on sign-out | Every logon |
- Off (the default) means machine drives only. The tray and menu bar show nothing about signing in.
- Stays signed in keeps a refresh token — never a password — on the machine, sealed to that Windows account or that Mac login. Revoking the person's device in the console ends it within two minutes.
- Each logon asks once when the person logs on, then renews silently until they log off.
- Only if they choose to never prompts: the menu item is there for anyone who wants their drives. Machine drives work throughout.
- Ask again is the longest a stored sign-in is honoured before the person must prove who they are again, whatever the mode.
- Ways to sign in can be narrowed per customer or machine, for example Microsoft only on a domain-joined fleet. Caryvane never asks for a Windows or macOS password.
3. What the person sees #
- Windows: right-click the Caryvane tray icon → Sign in to Caryvane Drive…. Microsoft and Google open in the default browser and come straight back; a Caryvane password is typed in the small window, with a one-time code if the account has one. Their drives appear within a few seconds — the preferred letter if free, otherwise the next free one — and the item then reads Caryvane Drive: name — Sign out.
- macOS: the Caryvane menu bar item gains Sign in to Caryvane Drive…; the drives appear in Finder under their names.
- Two people, one PC: each sees only their own drives, in their own session. Both can have U:, for different content.
- Signing out removes the drives at once and, under a purging policy, deletes that person's cached files from the machine. Logging off does the same.
Leavers, lost laptops and expired sign-ins #
- Disable the drive user and every machine drops their drives at its next check, within about two minutes; nothing further can be signed in with that account.
- Revoke one device (Drive Users → the person → devices) to end a single machine's or phone's sign-in while the others continue.
- An expired sign-in never pulls a drive out from under an open document: the machine keeps the drive for a few minutes while the app renews, and only then removes it.
- A machine that is offline at logon shows machine drives from cache and no personal drives. That is deliberate: a personal drive requires the server to vouch for the person.
Notes #
- Personal drives need per-session mounting (on by default since 1.0.29x on Windows); a machine where it has been switched off reports that sign-in is unavailable rather than offering a drive every user could see.
- Change reports, versions, tags and Explorer badges work on a personal drive exactly as on a machine drive.
- Every policy change is in the audit trail, with who changed it and what it became.