File system for intermittent access
I'm looking for an external drive to increase my MacBook Pro's storage. I generally use my laptop on my lap, so I want wireless access. So far, so good, not a problem.
But I don't want to have to keep mounting and unmounting the drive. I'm used to just snapping the lid shut to put it to sleep, whatever I'm doing, then wake it up again somewhere else, on a completely different network, or no network at all. I might move from my home wireless network to a wired network at the office to sitting on a plane with wifi turned off.
The ideal solution would be a special kind of volume that ALWAYS appears mounted on my laptop, whether the real disk is online or not, and never gives errors (unless maybe the connection goes away while I'm actually in the middle of reading a file). If I write to this volume and there's no connection to the physical storage it would queue the files locally and automatically write them next time I'm within range. Most importantly, it will never, ever display a "searching for volume" message and lock up the Finder for minutes on end!
For bonus marks it could be clever and cache commonly used files locally so they appear to be there even when I'm offline, and perhaps transparently support alternate access to the same files (eg. I might have a server machine that provides WebDAV access to my disk from the public Internet, but I still want to access my files via SMB or NFS when I'm at home but my ADSL connection has gone down). The key thing is not to give stupid errors and timeouts each time my network changes, though, which it does a lot!
Does anything like that exist?
-Rolf
But I don't want to have to keep mounting and unmounting the drive. I'm used to just snapping the lid shut to put it to sleep, whatever I'm doing, then wake it up again somewhere else, on a completely different network, or no network at all. I might move from my home wireless network to a wired network at the office to sitting on a plane with wifi turned off.
The ideal solution would be a special kind of volume that ALWAYS appears mounted on my laptop, whether the real disk is online or not, and never gives errors (unless maybe the connection goes away while I'm actually in the middle of reading a file). If I write to this volume and there's no connection to the physical storage it would queue the files locally and automatically write them next time I'm within range. Most importantly, it will never, ever display a "searching for volume" message and lock up the Finder for minutes on end!
For bonus marks it could be clever and cache commonly used files locally so they appear to be there even when I'm offline, and perhaps transparently support alternate access to the same files (eg. I might have a server machine that provides WebDAV access to my disk from the public Internet, but I still want to access my files via SMB or NFS when I'm at home but my ADSL connection has gone down). The key thing is not to give stupid errors and timeouts each time my network changes, though, which it does a lot!
Does anything like that exist?
-Rolf
Comments
You can get a Time Capsule and use for backup and as a network file storage.
Sure, but I don't think that quite gives me what I want. I don't have a Time Capsule but I do already have a USB drive connected to my wireless base station that I can use for storage. I'm not specifically after backup so much as extra storage. It's having to keep worrying about mounting and unmounting the drive that I'm trying to avoid. Does Time Capsule help with that?
(The main response I've had from other people I've asked by the way is "no I don't know of anything like that, but let me know if you find anything because that's exactly what I'm looking for too!")
-Rolf
iDisk is slow and not enough space.
Exactly. I'm talking 100's of GB here. Plus I don't want to entrust my data to some 3rd party company over the Internet.
I'm sure there's a gap in the market here. People only seem able to think either in terms of desktop machines, with permanent wired access to large hard drives, or ultra mobile access to comparatively very small files over the Internet. Most computers sold these days are laptops with WiFi access though, and the nature of laptops is that the network repeatedly goes away and comes back again.
Imagine you were using Mail.app on your laptop but you couldn't compose messages while offline, where you had to log off before putting the computer to sleep or changing network settings or you might lose all your messages, and where you had to remember to log on and enter your password again each time you wanted to check for messages after waking the computer up. That's unnecessarily user-unfriendly, so why shouldn't a disk work the same way that Mail does so you can just leave it permanently running in the background without worrying about what network you're on?
Does that about sum it up?
So, to be clear... You want a large hard drive sitting on your desk at home and you want to be able to access that hard drive from anywhere in the world over any network connection? You also want your computer to automatically sync files that you use regularily? Oh, and you want no type of error messages reported when your laptop won't connect to it?
Does that about sum it up?
Not at all. You're right about the large drive sitting on my desk part but strike the "access from anywhere in the world" and "automatically sync files to it" bits. They would be nice to have bonus features but are in no way a core feature. The key point is the convenience of not having to worry about whether it's connected all the time. I already have a large drive sitting on my desk that I can access wirelessly. The point is that I don't use it, because it keeps going offline and I'm too lazy to remount it. The whole process simply isn't as convenient or user friendly as it might be.
Consider printing, or email. If you try and print something or compose an email while you're offline you might get a message that it couldn't immediately complete the task but your job is queued and it's easy enough to resume (as soon as you turn your base station, on or fix whatever the problem is). All pretty seamless and convenient for the user.
Imagine instead that everytime your laptop's network changes the contents of your Out box are deleted and you need to re-enter your SMTP settings. You wouldn't be very impressed! That's basically where we are with file systems, though, and it sucks in comparison to how it could and should work.
-Rolf