Azure as mounted drives on local computers

Question

I am wondering if there is a way for me to mount a (or many) drive(s), assigning it a driveletter such as G: (on my local computer), and having that point to a Azure storage account.

I would also like to be able to mount the drive(s) on multiple computers (having it act a bit like dropbox).

What would be a good approach to accomplish this?

Edit: Windows Azure Drive looks to be intresting, but from what I understand, its only possible to mount on cloud/server systems, not a local computer? Not able to find any other info on this.

Answer 1

Doing this kind of stuff is a huge task. You need to understand Azure API and Windows API to make this happen. Look at the history of the tools I mention below, to see which challenges you have to solve on that way. Some offer an CLI - this could be the way to go to customize, if you develop a product and have constraints on time & budget.

I successfully used and can recommend CloudBerry Drive Desktop for mounting an Azure Blob container as a network share. The product has a large focus and offers syncing strategies. However the value of these tools depends largely on the use case you did not mention. Many Azure Explorer tools do not map Azure Storage entities into the concept of a network share or external drive, they just enable you to browse over Azure resources and read & write back data. Desktop applications that are based on project files referencing other files in project directories will usually not work. This is what I experienced.

The Windows Azure Storage Team Blog offers an overview of available tools on the market and even recently updated in May 2014.

• Windows Azure Storage Explorers (2014)

I tried and liked both tools from Cerebrata, well designed, but they did not match my use case having a project file based desktop application as I mentioned above.

The overview also contains the Windows Azure Storage Explorer that is an open source project at Codeplex. This could be useful to see some code, but the product can not compete with others in the overview.

Answer 2

disibox is a simple implementation of Dropbox using Windows Azure. There is also CloudBerry Explorer for Windows Azure which provides drag & drop functionality but no drive mapping. In BETA is CloudBerry Drive, which maps your cloud storage as a local disk to access and edit files in the cloud directly from the Windows Explorer interface.