Syncing the Agent with a CTERA Portal

Content on the CTERA Portal can be synced to your PC, giving you local access to the CTERA Portal content. In addition, local content on a PC running a CTERA Agent can be synchronized with the CTERA Portal Cloud Drive.

Users can sync files across multiple devices, such as a desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones via the CTERA Portal. Whenever any change of any kind is made to any synced file, the same change is made immediately in the other synced locations.

For example, if a file is deleted from one of the folders, the same file is deleted from the other synced folders. It makes no difference in which of the synced folders the change was made.

Users can collaborate easily with others. Users can sync any number of shared folders with folders on other peoples' devices. Everyone who syncs the shared folder can view, update, and delete the files in the shared folder and the change is applied everywhere the file is shared. For details about collaboration, see Sharing Content.

Syncing content between the CTERA Portal cloud drive and the CTERA Agent can be configured in one of the following ways:

• Syncing selected cloud drive folders from the CTERA Portal top level cloud drive with the CTERA Agent. To sync a folder, in Windows File Explorer, right-click the folder on your computer to share or that contains files to share and select CTERA Agent > Sync this folder.
• As a Caching Agent. All your cloud drive content in the CTERA Portal, cloud folders you own and the files and folders shared with you under Shared With Me, are presented as stubs on your workstation's local disk.
  You do not need to explicitly sync a certain folder, as the cloud drive folder structure and files are automatically visible on the local disk. However, the actual content of the files might not be there, and is downloaded from the CTERA Portal on demand. This allows full visibility of your entire data, while utilizing a very small amount of local disk space: The main storage remains in the cloud with stubs saved locally. A stub is a file with a tiny footprint that contains the metadata about the file, such as the file name, size, and modification date. Only the folder and file metadata and not the actual file content is saved locally. When a user accesses a file stub, the file is downloaded from the cloud. After the download has completed, the file is unstubbed. Any changes to the file are synced back to the CTERA Portal.
  Files that are always required locally can be marked as available offline, in which case they, and not the stubs, are stored locally.

When to Configure a Caching Agent

With the default sync configuration, when a Caching Agent is not configured, you select the content you want to sync from the CTERA Portal to your local computer. The more you sync the more storage you need on your computer. When a Caching Agent is configured, you have access to everything locally that you have permission to access on the CTERA Portal: all your cloud drive content in the CTERA Portal, cloud folders you own and the files and folders shared with you under Shared With Me. However, you only store what you are working on at the moment or what you want to be permanently available locally.

When you access the same small set of files repeatedly, from a larger pool of files, using a Caching Agent is recommended. The commonly used files are available locally while the other files are stored in the CTERA Portal. The files stored in the CTERA Portal are still accessible locally when required, by clicking a file stub to download and open the file locally.

For details about setting up and using CTERA Drive Share with Caching Mode enabled, see For details about setting up and using CTERA Drive Share with Caching Mode enabled, see Caching With the CTERA Agent.