How to Manage Your Files in the Cloud?
How to Manage Your Files in the Cloud?
A 2022 Guide for Multi-Site File Sync
Morro Data CloudNAS enables multi-site syncing of files with high performance while keeping the master copy of files in the cloud. It’s a hybrid cloud storage architecture that addresses the two issues that have prevented many businesses from using cloud storage – low performance and no control. We use cache to help with performance and use the familiar NAS interface to give admin control with Active Directory. On top of that, we design a global file system for multi-site file syncing so remote team users can collaborate across sites as if working on the same network. We call this function simply SYNC.
What is Replicate
REPLICATE is a share type we applied to Cloud NAS. The biggest difference between Sync and Replicate is the number of write sources for the share. Sync allows multiple sources and is bi-directional while Replicate has only one source and is one-way. Accordingly, the Replicate protocol is more lightweight and thus can be much faster for single-source applications such as the pub-sub workflow or cloud backup. Replicate can also be used to effectively transfer or distribute files, with the added benefit of leaving a copy in the cloud storage.
Performance Comparison
It can take a long time to convert a Replicate Share to a Sync Share (an hour). The conversion phase includes traversing the entire share and deciding the status of each file, followed by synchronizing any file additions, deletions, or modifications. The total time depends on the number of files in the share, the number of changes that need to be synchronized, and the hardware performance.
Suggested Usage
| Application | Sync | Replicate |
| Multi-site collaboration | Yes | – |
| Single-site collaboration | Yes | Yes |
| Replicate to other sites | Slower | Yes |
| Backup to cloud | Slower | Yes |
| Large file transfer | Yes | Yes |
| Disaster Recovery | Yes | Yes |