Can I make a network drive look like a local drive with SftpDrive?

Hi I was wondering if there is any way to make the drive mapped by sftpdrive look like a local drive instead of a mapped network drive (at least to the OS). I have some apps that don't work with network drives. They will work, however, with virtual local drives.

One workaround I tried was to use TrueCrypt to create a volume inside a file on the network drive. I connect to the network drive with sftpdrive and then mount the volume with TrueCrypt. It works but has a couple of disadvantages. One is that only one person can mount the TrueCrypt volume at the same time or things can get messy. Another is when I do a backup of the network drive I have to recopy the entire TrueCrypt volume rather than just the files that require updating.

I already tried the subst command, but this just makes another network drive. If there is a simple workaround that would be great! If not, I hope it wouldn't be too difficult to add an option like this in a future release? Thanks you your help!

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Jeff Mancuso, Official Rep, replied on June 23, 2008 14:40

People have tried this before:

http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.p...

To a bit of success, would that work?

We could potentially mark the drive as a local drive with windows, but it could introduce unforeseen complications [that we certainly wouldn't have tested], so I'd be worried to just flip that switch.

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Dennis Hall commented on June 24, 2008 00:37

Thanks Jeff. As you can see in my original post I have already tried the workaround using a TrueCrypt volume, which seems to be the same idea as using a PGP volume and was also mentioned in the post you linked to. It was less than ideal for the reasons I mentioned already, but looks like my only option for the time being. The file that contains the virtual disk is 256MB and I may need to expand that, so you can see why I'm looking for other options. In the end, I may need to have all users manually copy each data file as its needed. Maybe just use TrueCrypt for the config files, or just store the config files locally.

I have worked in software development so I can certainly understand your misgivings about a change like that to the product.
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Simon Weatherill replied on September 09, 2008 15:46

Unless you're using a canned backup program that doesn't allow you to run a "pre-script", since TrueCrypt runs under Linux as well now, you could unencrypt the drive, find out what files have changed, create a new TrueCrypt volume that is big enough to hold the changed files, copy them over and then only back up the new TrueCrypt volume file.

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Dennis Hall commented on September 09, 2008 16:28

Thanks for the reply! Yes, that would be a good way to do the backups. Unfortunately, the real killer with that was the limitation that only one person could mount the volume at any one time.

We also had another app that used an Access database on the back end (on the server but not on the encrypted volume). Sometimes, lock files would get created and never get cleared. People often got locked out of the database. It might have been a server issue.

In the end, we decided to only use sftp for straight file transfers. Everything else is now done over a VPN. We're migrating away from the app that doesn't like network drives.