Ask HN: Elastic Storage Space

2 points by multimedial 3 years ago | 1 comment

Hello,

my name is Chris and I am a german developer looking for feedback on an idea of mine that I would like to develop further.

The idea is to blend cloud-based storage space with the local file system in order to transparently expand storage space.

This would probably best be done as a file system driver which monitors pre-defined folders on the harddisk for given quotas, eventually transferring files to cloudspace when their surpass the preset quota space for the folder.

Once safely transferred (controlled by hash value), the local file would be replaced by a link which can then be resolved upon re-request of the file.

The idea is to thereby provide some sort of elastic storage space which only holds the most important/most often requested files locally. Everything else gets transferred to the cloud, thereby providing "unlimited" storage space or at least "greater than your hard disk size".

Does such a software already exist?

If not, would that be of interest to the community?

Thanks for any insight/comment/suggestion.

giaour 3 years ago |

I think Dropbox/OneDrive have some form of lazy local syncing. As far as I know, though, there is no automated pruning of local copies of the least recently used files, but that sounds like a cool idea.

If you just want pure cloud storage that acts like a local disk, Azure File Storage containers are mountable (at least in Windows). I'm sure there is a FUSE driver for other cloud storage providers.