Clouds Are White-Maned Horses!

Clouds are white-maned horses!

Lately, people seem to be sharing all sorts of useful materials with me across a variety of cloud storage services—Google Drive, OneDrive, Yandex Disk, Dropbox and so on. The links arrive through different channels: some people send them by email, others through messaging apps, while some even insert them into documents that are themselves stored in the cloud.

Often, someone will say, “We’ll put everything related to this project in this folder.” Needless to say, a week or two later the message has vanished deep into the chat history, and finding that cloud folder again becomes rather difficult—especially if the information in it is not critically important.

Of course, there are desktop apps such as Google Drive that sync cloud content with a local drive. Unfortunately, however, the app does not see folders that I do not own and that merely appear under “Shared with me”.

Fed up with this mess, I decided to organise all the folders shared with me. That was when I discovered rclone, a brilliant utility that can sync data between a huge range of cloud storage services and a local drive. It even runs from the command line! Absolute bliss: configure it once, add it to cron and enjoy.

I set up rclone to download all my cloud folders to my local NAS, including everything under “Shared with me” in Google Drive. When it finished, I was stunned.

It turns out I still had access to a huge number of cloud folders that someone and I had once agreed to use for sharing photos from trips, conferences, birthday parties and so on. And they really did contain photos whose existence I had never even suspected. Presumably, the pictures had been uploaded long after the events themselves.

Here is one of them. I found it in an album devoted to The Electronic Age of Science, a conference I organised in Dagestan in September 2021.

Do you know what is currently stored in every folder you have ever been given access to?