Just wanted to let you all know I’ve found a better solution, however as of now it only works on Windows. I wrote a short guide here. This solution uses predictive pre-fetching and a re-sizable local cache. Also has built in AES-256 bit kernel-based encryption. It’s very simple and seems to be working extremely well for me.
I’ve used CloudDrive as well. In my experimentation, it worked reasonably well. The only issue is that it requires Windows. Not all dedicated server providers offer windows installations other than server (which requires steep licensing fees). I did try installing Windows 10 as a VM in Proxmox on a SYS server, which worked but seemed to be too complex for what I was after. I’ve ended up shipping a bunch of hard drives to Delimiter to use in their Slot Server with 6 bays for $69/month. I preloaded the drives with media in a ZFS zpool which can easily be imported once they are in the server. I will likely run Ubuntu 16.04 with QuickBox, or may try installing Proxmox and have QuickBox running on a 16.04 VM. Both Proxmox and Ubuntu have ZFS natively available. In the meantime, I’m hoping to get an invite to Plex Cloud and may backup my media there to have available to my users if my main Plex server is down for whatever reason. I do realize this means having the media in ACD unencrypted. I figure, the worst that can happen is they remove the files. I have backups elsewhere.
my first thought was ewwww. I dont touch Windows unless I have to. I suppose some people feel the same way about linux but for me its not even an option.
Good luck on those Plex Cloud invites. I opted in the first hour they announced and still haven’t gotten one. They are not following an invite queue as they suggest and it’s completely random. Also, if you were one of the first to sign up for the invite… they more than likely lost your invite due to “invite server complications”
If that new service is anything like Plex Sync (the one they have had for about 3 years now) I’d pass. It’s been broken forever.
I’ve had a stab at setting up rclone, as acd_cli seems to be buffering some evenings, and i’m wondering if i could pick your brain?
I installed rclone, set up the config called “remote” using the instructions here http://rclone.org/amazonclouddrive/
And running the command rclone lsd remote: i do get a list of whats in my drive. However when i try to mount my drive it just seems to hang for a while and does nothing. In so far as in the cmd line, just moves onto the next line and doesn’t allow me to input anything, and just sits there. I mount with the code
rclone mount remote: /home/smilingheadcase/ACD
When i try to do it with the --allow-other parameter i get an error message “unknown flag: --allow-other”
rclone mount remote: /home/smilingheadcase/ACD --allow-other &
The strange thing is, i can run allow other with the ACD with no issues and my Plex does see its contents and looking into the fuse.config file allow others is enabled.
Is there any chance you could shed some light on the issues?
Thanks
you need the & at the end so it puts the mount in the background.
rclone mount remote: /home/smilingheadcase/ACD & should work.
Go has a hard time running things natively in the background so thats what the & does otherwise it’ll hang like you’re experiencing.
My current manual mount command:
rclone mount acd: ~/cloud/acd/ --allow-other --no-modtime --dir-cache-time=2m &
The latest betas correct the caching issue so thats where the --dir-cache-time=2m comes in. It will refresh the mount contents every 2 minutes. The latest betas also fix the seek issues and he fixed a performance issue in the mount as well.
I tend to look out there for rclone updates and pull down the latest dev code:
http://rclone.org/install/#install-from-source
I did set it up to automount on reboot per someones comments in a bug report(I take no credit for the script other than a minor tweak):
rclonemount.txt (1.8 KB)
You’d rename that to just ‘rclonemount’ and place it into /usr/bin/ and make it executable with chmod +x rclonemount.
You can then mount it in fstab like this:
rclonemount#smilingheadcase#remote: /home/smilingheadcase/ACD fuse _netdev,allow-other,defaults 0 0
the latest rclone betas fix most of my issues with it. The one minor issue is I would like to be able to manually refresh the mount so I could put it into a rclone move script so it would move the contents to acd and then refresh the mount and then trigger plex to scan for updates…we’re almost there.
Thanks for the reply, i’ll try it out.
I am at 14.7 TB in ACD right now. I’ve been having people use plex against it and it’s been working without any hiccups. I am limited in my upload speed on my seedbox(it’s one of those OVH Specials with 250mbit upload) so I’ve been playing with throttling the ‘rclone move’ command so it leaves enough headroom for seeding/plex otherwise it will saturate the upload and starve the others.
Very cool. So rclone seems stable enough to replace a local server then?
I dont know how ACD will hold up to seeding. You can try it and let us know. I have about 7TBs of local space so I have no need to seed from it. I am only using it for offloading my media and using it with Plex.
I’d like to get this setup with my seedbox over at Feral Hosting. They don’t allow their users to use encfs because of the permissions it specifically requires. I do have a standard version of rclone running however. Do you think I’d have issues using this fork of rclone? I’d try it myself but I’m not quite savvy enough so I’ll end up troubleshooting regardless.
EDIT: Looks like FUSE is what’s required and I think that is what they are aprehensive to allowing their users to setup, I THINK. I was reading the docs and it looks like rclone also requires FUSE. Any suggestions for something similar to feral that would allow me to do this?
yes, it use fuse and thats what Feral has issues with. You’d probably need to look at another provider that supports fuse mounts.
Did you set yours up through a VPS? Seems like that might be the way to go. I really like Feral for the 1tb storage and unlimited bandwidth for the price they offer, everything else seems to be at least double that and they tend to not offer unlimited bandwidth.
feral oversells their server so it ends up being not as good as they say it is.
but you could rent a vps and set up ACD on it. you look at hetzner they might not be world class but if your just seeding and putting on cloud its fine. if that does not work for you there is ovh, sys… and many more.
You will need any server that allows for true root and not a jailed environment. I had tried to mount ACD within feral and it’s just as @RXWatcher states…
fuse and thats what Feral has issues with.
Be it a VPS or a Dedicated server, you’ll have the ability to mount the drives locally and thus… you pay a bit extra, but the payout is you now have an unlimited Media server that can play from your seedbox.
I have a Hetzner server with 6TB of space. I seed for a while and stash everything in a local-sorted mount, which then parses over to the encrypted mount for uploading to Amazon. This then gives you the chance to have things uploaded and remove the data you no longer need… thus you are continually uploading new data to your ACD while being able to retain space on your server without being bummed that you have to delete that media file or document.
It’s all pretty slick and it is worth the extra dollars for the server and the annual fee (in my opinion)… especially if you’re into data hoarding.
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if he wanted to he could even go for one of the smaller servers if he is not keen on spending more money.
That’s true, I am just mentioning what I personally have. I started with a little 120GB SSD server with Online.net. We all know how that goes. More data comes in before ratios are satisfied. 
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my only issue now is QOS. I’m looking at installing FireHOL with FireQOS. I was watching movies with the wife this weekend and the torrenting was impacting the plex watching. We had some buffering going on. I killed the rtorrent and related apps and it was perfect the rest of the night.
I only have a 250mbit upload. I want the acd download and plex traffic to have priority over torrent download/upload and acd upload.
would be nice to stream right from acd. then you would not need the server to watch stuff… but many things go with that. one big one is transcoding…
That’s a pretty solid plan. I may look into the same. One thing I did notice in running a few tests over the past couple of days was Plex would buffer during heavy torrent use, whereas Emby… not so much. (food for thought)
I’m going to push an update (try to) either tonight or tomorrow that pushes Emby out. Not to mention, Emby can be ran easily as the user and see these mounts, whereas Plex was giving me some initial grief.
Also… I can only seem to get an average of 4.5MB/s (uploading the files from/to) from the server to the ACD. I haven’t vested too much time into why that’s limited. Surely this is something with the API?