Mount as network drive in Windows

Hello!

I’m using rclone to mount the cloud providers in my system, in Windows, and so far so good :). However, I would like to have them showing up as a network drive instead. Is that possible?

Thanks! :slight_smile:

Do you mean making them visible over the network? I think you can use the normal drive sharing facilities for that can’t you? (Not a Windows expert - sorry!)

When mounted as network drive, reduced unnecessary file access, such as creating a thumbnail of a video file, in windows explorer. Therefore, file navigation is a little faster.

Thanks!

Nope. Windows differentiates between drives connected to the system and drives connected through Samba, FTP and other protocolos. Those are called network drives. As @bhpark84 mentions, it reduces file accesses, but I want it better for a cosmetic fact: They are easier to recognise in File Explorer when you also have a bunch of HDDs connected in your system. Also, you can “partition” Google Drive, OneDrive and similar this way, which is not so good :stuck_out_tongue:

Also, there is any way to ask for setting large names as the Drive’s labels? You can’t go further away of labelling drives as “Drive” for Google Drive or “ODrive” for OneDrive, because Google Drive and OneDrive doesn’t fit.

I made --volname work under windows in a recent beta ( the latest beta)

  --volname string                     Set the volume name (not supported by all OSes).

Is that what you are trying? No idea what the name lengths are though!

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Hi!
I would like to second this request. Windows treats files on network drives differently that local disk files, and it might fit a network-based filesystem better. Having this as an option would be great. WinFSP does supports the mounting of drives as network drives https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfsp/wiki/WinFsp-Design#winfsp-device-namespace , although I’m unsure how difficult it would be to implement for rclone.
Thanks.

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I'm trying to see how I can implement this myself by passing custom arguments to WinFSP while mounting, without success so far.

I'm starting to look at the code and try to implement it myself, although it's my first time in Go. @ncw if you can hint me where the driver "\Device\WinFsp.Disk" is called in rclone code, so I can switch it to "\Device\WinFsp.Net" would be really appreciated.

Rclone calls the cgofuse library which in turn uses the WinFSP FUSE layer.

I'm not sure exactly where that gets called - you'll have to do a bit of digging.

I don't think rclone calls it directly though.

Got it working! Just by adding "--fuse-flag --VolumePrefix=\server\share" to the mount command.

However, --volname got ignored and it's being mounted with this name:

Captura

Any ideas?

This should be added to the docs!

--volname seems to work for me

 rclone mount -vv --volname Potato . Q:

image

What does VolumePrefix do? Can you link some docs for that?

Which bit should be added to the docs? --VolumePrefix?

Yeah it does normally. What I meant is that it doesn't work when used in conjuction with VolumePrefix=\server\share

That flag tells cgofuse that we want to mountpoint the drive as a network share (that's what we discussed in this thread, that now it's not possible to mount as a network drive in rclone. With that flag passed to cgofuse, it can be mounted as network!). As I said some time ago, I wanted to have drives mounted as Network Shares and I wanted to investigate this. I had some spare time this week and I decided to come back at investigating, until I found this: https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/1018#issuecomment-300237436

I think it's a good idea to add a flag to mount the drive as a network, so I will make a PR this week adding it if you don't mind.
However, would be great to have this sorted out before!

Do we need a new flag if it can be done already with the existing flags?

Maybe what we need is more docs as you suggested?

Done!: https://github.com/rclone/rclone/pull/3766

Sorry for taking so long to reply and to update the documentation, I've been really busy lately, but it's finally done! :blush:

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