17/12/2017 UPDATE: This comparison was based on ExpanDrive 5. ExpanDrive 6 has been released with some big changes. Check out my review! I’ll be updating this article soon to represent a comparison between Odrive and ExpanDrive 6
That is the question I am presently trying to work out, but to what end?
Well, Odrive and ExpanDrive both provide unified access to your cloud providers as though they were local drives on your computer. What this means is that you can do away with file synchronisation and the need to store local copies of files.
As an example, a typical Dropbox setup would have your Dropbox folder on your computer where you store everything. If your local hard drive gets full then you need to look at what you can remove by selectively synchronising the files you need and not the ones you don’t. The downside of this is that when you do need some of those files you chose to stop synchronising you have to either re-sync them or download them from the web interface, neither of which is ideal. Odrive and ExpanDrive take this and say ok, how about we just synchronise the files we need as we need them and until we need them they live in the cloud, thus freeing up lots of local disk space. In addition to that, they enable access in the same way to multiple cloud storage providers such as Amazon Drive, Google Drive, Amazon S3, OneDrive, Box and more.
Which one is better, though? I don’t want to fork out cash for something I don’t use in the long run, and ultimately I’d like to use it across a few computers without paying extra.