Virtual File System - Trying to understand how it works

Hello,

If there is a link I should review please point me in the right direction.

I’m trying to get my head around the basic functions of the OwnCloud file system with and without virtual files enabled.

It appears the when the owncloud client 2.5.2 client is installed it will ask what do you want to sync. This make the cloud and local files equal.

Once synced will the local file cache expire at some point or when sync is enabled if I have 200GB of data on owncloud, I will have the same 200GB of data on my local computer?

My hope was to be able to free up local disk storage.

Then I saw the Virtual file system. This looked promising. However, Once I convert my sync to virtual files. I can see my local storage usage is much lower. However, I open files they care converted back to proper files. If Virtual file system is enabled will the local file cache expire at some point and convert back to being a very small Virtual file?


With that said, if our use scenario was to free up local storage space, is the only way to do this with use of the web interface only having to manually push and pull files?

I bit of background. I just came off of testing a product called CentreStack. It had an interesting method only creating a local cache of files if you navigated to the them in the file system. Then if you did not use them it would clear the local cache of the file, syncing as needed.

It allowed a you have a large cloud storage system, yet only bring down files as needed. Of course you can also create sync folders too, so you can ensure you had offline access.

  • Mike

Auto-replacing the local copy with the virtual file was discussed here:
https://github.com/owncloud/client/issues/6815

2 Likes

Thank you I’ll review.

Hello,

I have looked at the link. It looks like like this feature may be coming in next client version 2.6

Thanks,
Mike