On Fri, 20 Mar 2015 14:24:54 -0400, J. Clarke wrote:

In article ,
says...

In uk.comp.os.linux Tim Watts wrote:
It would be fun to sniff the conversation between Drive and my
computer - with a minimal client so I don't see all the web
supporting stuff.

There are clients like:
https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse
https://github.com/iwonbigbro/gsync
https://www.jobnix.in/dropbox-comman...ce-cli-client/

I don't know of their maturity. Bolting on encryption is another
question.

However, even encrypted I don't think this is the full solution.
Because the model is that everything lives primarily in the cloud,
whereas we're using the cloud as simply a disposable cache of what we
have locally. That means they don't present the unified worldview of
'here are all the files you can have, but some of them will take
longer' that a remote FS would do.

I can't speak for "the cloud" in general but OneDrive synchs on all
computers on which the client is installed (you don't need to install
the client to use the service--you can also access it using a web
browser and download whatever you need but you lose the transparency),
so for all my OneDrive files I eventually end up with four copies, one
on my workstation, one on my server, one on my laptop, and one at
Microsoft. Which unless Microsoft decides to screw me over with my own
data, is actually a pretty good arrangement--it would take a fairly
substantial disaster to lose all copies.

DropBox works the same way. One copy on every installed computer and one
on their cloud servers. Exception is mobile devices which download on
demand. I believe the android client will let you specify particular
files to keep locally.