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Thursday, August 28, 2014

Free Cloud Service as a mapped network drive: WebDAV

I have two computers sitting at one desk. They share a keyboard and monitor with a nifty $16 device that switches with a button. (I just checked. It went up to $19.99) Often, I'll be working on one and need to switch over to the other. Subconsciously, I want to use the clipboard, but I know better. I thought I'd just share a folder and pass text documents through it as a fairly simple work around. It would be better than emailing myself, and would allow me to pass images and other files easily as well.

One of them is running Windows 7 Home Premium. The other is running Windows 7 Professional. The Professional one is also joined to a domain, and that causes confusion when trying to do file shares with a homegroup. (This article will tell you how to convert / copy your domain profile to local) When I began to run into trouble getting this to work, I started looking at ways to map Google Drive as a network drive. I found a service that does exactly that, and supports other cloud services, but they charge a fee. I'm fine with someone making a buck, but I have a saying "If it's free, it's for me.", so I went looking for a free option.
In my searching up to this point, I learned an important vocabulary term "Web DAV".
From Wikipedia: Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that facilitates collaboration between users in editing and managing documents and files stored on World Wide Web servers

What I found was "Box" or "Box.com". (formerly box.net) You get a free account with 10G storage and 10G transfer.  Visit their site for premium options. (no affiliation and too soon to review)

Once I created and verified my account, I simply mapped a network drive.

Box.com will provide you with the link to put in the "Folder" field.
In the dialog, I had to check the "Connect using different credentials" option.
Whatever email address you use to create your box.com account will be the user name and your box.com password will be used here as well.

My Home premium system shows the drive being nearly full, but my Professional one shows it much larger than my actual quota. If that's the worst problem with it, then it's functional enough for my immediate needs.

YMMV!

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