Any clouds you have connected during setup will also now appear as external drives on your Mac, and you can access them just like you would a USB drive. During the installation, you can connect your storage locations if you wish, and once it’s installed, a taskbar icon becomes available. It’s to the point and doesn’t mess around. So after using it for 7 days, I’ve tried to cover off all the things I would do or use on a regular basis.ĮxpanDrive has a straight forward installer. Native file access just like an externally attached drive.Background file transfers for small files and real-time transfers for large files.Connect to multiple storage platforms at once, including most common platforms, with a single application.So it is relatively inexpensive, with additional discounts for multiple licenses and for educational or non-profit users. Once the trial expires, you can purchase a single-user license for USD $49.95 or with lifetime upgrades for USD $74.95.

The only difference is that the speed of access is highly impacted by the speed of your internet connection.Īt the time of writing ExpanDrive has a free 7-day trial (it was 30 days when I first planned to test and compare it, but by the time I began the test it was disappointingly reduced to 7 days). Similarly, you can save directly to them just like a regular external drive. As long as you are on the internet, you can then enter these storage destinations anytime and access the files on them as you would any other external drive.

Each of your cloud storage systems becomes a drive connected to your computer. Manually removing files from synchronising with my various cloud accounts is a pain, especially since there are terabytes of data in my Dropbox and it takes quite a while to load the full folder tree.ĮxpanDrive behaves like an external USB attached drive, or more accurately a series of USB attached storage. I’m also looking at it as a way of reducing the data footprint of those cloud platforms on my local machine, so not actually storing files locally is a significant benefit here. That includes Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive, and OwnCloud. I started trialling ExpanDrive 5 to see if, compared to Odrive, it would be a more or less viable alternative to running all the different cloud synchronising apps for all the different cloud services I use. UPDATE: This review was based on ExpanDrive 5. ExpanDrive 6 has been released with some big changes.

Expandrive review 2017