One of my greatest frustrations with cloud drives is the inability to see all of my cloud files in Windows Explorer. Not only could I see and search all the files in one place, I could run dedup software against them (try that on a cloud drive – nope, you’ve got 12 copies of the same picture all over the place).Worse, sometimes they don’t save to the cloud properly
Worse, sometimes they don’t save to the cloud properly, and stuff I saved from one location doesn’t show up at the other for days. When I want to be sure a file is saved to my cloud drive, I don’t save it there. I:
- Save the file locally
- Log into my cloud drive using my browser
- Drag the file from my desktop into the browser window to upload.
But that all sucks.
Mounting All Cloud Drives besides Amazon
- Download and unzip the free program VisualSubst to somewhere smart, like c:\Programs\ (no viruses when I used)
- Start the app and add your drives like this:
- Pick a drive letter to map to
- Browse to the location of your OneDrive, Dropbox, or other network drive folders on your pc (Often in C:\users\[username]/ folder)
- Add the drive to the list
- I recommend clicking the “Apply virtual drives” checkbox
When you’re done, it will look something like this:
Mounting Amazon Cloud Drive
If you use the above method on your Amazon drive, it will look like it has mounted, but when you click on it, you won’t see your files. For this, you need something more radical.
- Download and install the Dokan library DokanSetup.exe
- Download and install ACDDokanNetInstaller.msi
- Start the ACD Dokan.Net application
- Under OPTIONS, select “Start App on Windows Start” AND “Mount on Startup”
- Select the ADD button, then choose Amazon Cloud Drive
- Select the drive letter (Z in my example, then click MOUNT, then log in via the browser window that opens
- Click OK when Amazon asks you for permissions
BOOM! You’re now mapped.