Setting Up a Caching Agent

If the CTERA Portal plan includes the Full Cloud Drive service, the CTERA Agent is automatically enabled for syncing. You can change the CTERA Agent to a Caching Agent in the CTERA Agent settings.

To set up the caching agent:

1. Connect the CTERA Agent to the CTERA Portal.
2. Right-click the CTERA Agent tray icon, , and select Settings.
   Or,
   Click the settings icon, , in the bottom right corner of the CTERA Agent window.
   The CTERA Agent Settings window is displayed.
   
3. Click Main > Cloud Drive in the navigation pane.
   The Cloud Drive page is displayed.
   
4. Click Settings and in the Cloud Drive Settings window that is displayed, click Advanced in the navigation pane.
   The Cloud Drive Settings page is displayed.
   
5. Make sure Enable Caching Mode is checked.
6. Optionally, set the maximum size for your cache.
   The cloud drive uses this cache and all the stubs are stored in the cache. When you click a stub, the file itself is downloaded from the CTERA Portal. You can mark a file as available offline, so that it is permanently stored in the cache. If a file is not marked as available offline, it is removed from the cache, leaving the stub, if the cache becomes too full.
   Thus, the size you assign to the cache will depend on the size of the files that you want to keep permanently in the cache as well as additional size for files to be downloaded for temporary use before being removed, leaving the stubs.
   Note

   If you download too many files, the cache grows to accommodate the extra storage until files are removed from the cache, on schedule, based on the Start eviction every value or when you click Evict Now, but performance suffers.

7. Optionally, set when you want to automatically evict files from the cache that are not available offline. These files are removed from the cache based on either the schedule set or at any point by clicking Evict Now.
8. Click Save.

The CTERA Agent is now enabled as a Caching Agent and all the CTERA Portal cloud drive folders are added to the PC cloud drive as stubs. This includes My Files, Shared With Me and any other folder added to the CTERA Portal cloud drive at the root level.

The files in the folder are stubs until opened, represented by the icon overlaying the icon for the file type, for example .
Opening a file downloads it from the CTERA Portal and the file is represented by the icon overlaying the icon for the file type.

Downloading Stub Files

When you click a stub to open it, the file is downloaded from the CTERA Portal. A stub is also downloaded from the CTERA Portal in the following scenarios:

• Searching for specific text in the files in a folder.
• Renaming, copying and moving a stub file.
• Deleting Stubs – When you delete a stub from your cloud drive, the file is first downloaded and then deleted from both the cloud drive and the CTERA Portal. The deleted file is moved to the Recycle Bin as with any file deleted locally.

Stub Size

The size of a stub in the local file system takes up almost no space. Right-clicking a stub and opening its properties shows the actual file size in the Size value and 0 bytes for the Size on disk value.