Getting Started

CTERA Drive Connect enables you to easily view all files on your CTERA Portal storage in Windows File Explorer or macOS Finder. Using CTERA Drive Connect you mount your CTERA Portal cloud drive as a disk in Windows File Explorer or macOS Finder so you can work on it as a local volume.

CTERA Drive Connect caches content from the portal so that all your cloud drive content in the portal, cloud folders you own and the files and folders shared with you under Shared With Me, are presented as stubs on your local disk, with ACLs fully supported.

You do not need to explicitly sync a folder, as the cloud drive folder structure and files are automatically visible on the local disk. However, the actual content of the files might not be there, and is downloaded from the portal on demand. This allows full visibility of your entire data, while utilizing a very small amount of local disk space: The main storage remains in the cloud with stubs saved locally. A stub is a file with a tiny footprint that contains the metadata about the file, such as the file name, size, and modification date. Only the folder and file metadata and not the actual file content is saved locally.

When a user accesses a file stub, the file is downloaded and opened locally. Files that are always required locally can be pinned, in which case they, and not the stubs, are stored locally, to allow offline access.