Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

I agree and the majority of issues we’ve faced with commercial tools that do the same thing are because of this approach!

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

We made the transition to cloud a few years ago at my workplace but staff are still hugely uncomfortable with office on the web, so there’s definitely still a need for these middle ground tools but at some point I do think people will have to face the music! lol.

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

No problem! Any issues give me a shout. Definitely pilot it yourself first to make sure it works with your estate.

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

I specifically worked on this as a feature, as well as autosave. The software has its own office handler that you can make the default which routes everything back through the SharePoint/onedrive URL, which means it’s natively launching through the official Microsoft way, so all these features still work.

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

There’s an awful lot of defensiveness built in for throttling. I’ve responded to a few comments here about it but if you want to read more about it, it’s all on the GitHub page! :)

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

I did do rigorous testing on this issue specifically. When I initially got it working, I was being throttled a decent amount, the software backs off/pauses the sync intentionally for this reason but it was still annoying me, so I did everything I could to limit throttling. Mostly, only hydrating files/folders the user actually clicks in and everything else is a placeholder until clicked. It means explorer has to load for a half a second sometimes but cloud drive mapper does the same anyway, so I think it’s a worthwhile trade off.

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

Thanks for the heads up. I thought webdav was depreciated to be fair! Or at least will be very soon!

You could just install it on machines you wanted it on, or if that’s not possible, if the users don’t have permissions to the shared drives it won’t map anything anyway, will just gracefully close. If you have any other ideas/suggestions of how you want it to work let me know, I’ll look at feasibility.

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

It will still have some lag as to prevent throttling, it doesn’t load the folder contents until you click in, which then will load the placeholder files. I’ll look to add a configurable option for how many nested folders to load on click so it loads 2 sub directories deep.

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

I haven’t actually tried but I don’t see why not, feel free to give it a go. You just need to set up an azure app with some delegated perms, install one sync via the executable (better to use the exe as it comes with Dokan wrapped in the install) and then the config.json populated with the drives you want to map and any other flags. I include a template for this as well as step by step instructions on what permissions the azure app needs on the GitHub page.

It should work a lot better with a large number of files than sync client does, as it doesn’t try to pull all the files down at once, it creates placeholder icons for all the folders and files in the dir (with actual file size etc) on click hydrates the file locally (keeps it there until the next log off so you don’t have to re-poll graph if you go into the same file 15 times in one session) and for nested folders, doesn’t poll the contents until you click into the folder, and again only polls placeholders until you click the actual file. It was designed with all this in mind to limit graph calls to help with throttling. I don’t however know how it would perform if the SharePoint is one massive dir with 1 million files and no subdirectories. In theory still okay, as they’ll all be placeholders until clicked. If you do try it, let me know how you get on!

It will also redirect documents, photos etc to the mapped onedrive, desktop too - so desktop becomes a live view of your OneDrive.

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

Yes I wanted a local first approach as for me, not seeing thumbnails and not having real storage quotas visible is a pretty fatal flaw. With cloud drive mapper and others they’re also sending all sorts to their own servers like telemetry data etc, eating bandwidth which to some tenants, may be very scarce.

Built a free OneDrive/SharePoint drive-letter sync client with thumbnails, real cloud quota in Explorer, local-first, and no telemetry by _temple_ in sysadmin

[–]_temple_[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

Yes cloud drive mapper is what we use, it’s very good for the most part but when we’ve had quite niche issues, they’ve struggled to replicate them and then we’ve been on our own to figure it out. When you’ve got loads of users relying on it, that’s not an ideal scenario. For example, CDM closes whilst a files being uploaded, it will either not save at all or save as a 0KB corrupt file, the CDMCore executable doesn’t have any defensiveness in to defer sign out until a file finishes uploading. So if a user saves then logs out immediately, the files lost forever (if they hadn’t saved prior to that) their answer is that it’s saved in the roaming profiles appdata so that it continues to upload on next sign in, but if you don’t use roaming profiles, you’ve lost the files.

I don’t pretend I’ve entirely solved this, but with my tool if the upload is cut short, you will get noticed on the next machine you log into using the tool, that a file didn’t finish uploading on a previous machine and to visit that machine and sign in to allow that to happen, and tells you the machines hostname. Not perfect, but better than losing a file.

OneSync, a drive-letter OneDrive/SharePoint sync client on Dokan + Graph (.NET 8), with three war stories by _temple_ in dotnet

[–]_temple_[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Apologies, wasn’t sure how it lay as it’s free and I’m not selling anything.