Show HN: WinCse – Integrating AWS S3 with Windows Explorer

[cbh34680]

WinCse is an application that integrates AWS S3 buckets with Windows Explorer. Utilizing WinFsp and the AWS SDK, WinCse allows you to treat S3 buckets as part of your local file system, making file management simpler. The application is currently in development, with plans for additional features and improvements.

[password4321]

In case anyone is not aware, https://github.com/rclone/rclone written in Go is the established swiss army knife of cloud storage sync, and supports mounting on Windows with many caveats (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/).

Congratulations on hitting the HN frontpage with your new project, mounting cloud storage locally is definitely a topic of interest!

[cbh34680]

Thank you for your comments. I found WinFsp to be very practical, so I tried implementing it in combination with the AWS SDK. While I believe RClone should be used in practice, I want to continue development for experimental purposes as well.

[js4ever]

This is a very early/basic implementation by looking at the limitations:

- File system editing is not yet supported (planned for future updates).

- Files larger than 4MB are not supported at this time.

- Referencing buckets in different regions fails.

- Only up to 1000 files can be displayed in a single directory

[cbh34680]

Thank you for your comment. As you pointed out, this software is a simple implementation that utilizes WinFsp and AWS SDK. I hope that by continuously improving it, it will become more useful over time.

[cgcrob]

Ah one click away from a $500 egress transfer bill.

I only say that because I’ve done it. The NAS is no longer backed up to S3. (Testing the backups caused the bill)

[cbh34680]

Thank you for the comment. You are absolutely right. Currently, it can only read small files, but I will add a note to the README when it becomes a high-performance tool capable of handling system backups.

[nimish]

Neat! The "native" version of FUSE for windows is a "Shell Namespace Extension" and might make it a little more integrated.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/namesp...

[cbh34680]

Thank you for the comment. The motivation for the development was the desire to easily view application logs in S3 (for free). Initially, I considered using FUSE, but I became interested after reading the following article: https://winfsp.dev/doc/Native-API-vs-FUSE/

[nimish]

Awesome, very interesting! Thanks for providing that.

WinFsp isn't "native" in the sense it's a wrapper on the Microsoft provided interface AFAICT

Shell Namespace extensions is the pure-windows way via COM and all that junk. WinFsp is very cool though since FUSE is a much nicer API but probably less you can do to be a very explorer thing

[cbh34680]

Thank you for the detailed explanation. Pure control of Explorer through COM also seems interesting. I'm still in the process of understanding WinFsp, so I can't get to that yet, but it's a challenge I want to tackle in the future.

[nimish]

Sounds awesome, would love to see how it turns out

[glonq]

Cool. I've been using Cyberduck as my awesome/free S3 GUI, but it's always great to see something new and different!

[cbh34680]

Thank you for your comment. I feel like I might be reinventing the wheel, so it could be a waste of time, but I also think that taking on the challenge is interesting.

[glonq]

Definitely not a waste of time! Keep up the great work.

[whatever1]

Isn’t this Dropbox ? (Okok joking)

[cbh34680]

It will totally outshine Dropbox. (Just kidding!)

[m-s-y]

I can understand using software like this in conjunction with local cacheing, but it seems to me that direct access to S3 would be fraught with edge cases and performance issues.

[cbh34680]

Thank you for your comment. While there is still room for improvement, I am currently caching short-term requests in memory or on disk as much as possible. Moving forward, I plan to actively cache items that can be cached.

[mNovak]

I think there's a lot of interest in this topic generally, so I hope this continues to develop. I for one pay for ExpanDrive, and am also aware of Mountain Duck in this space.

In my experience, those options are functional for infrequent operations, but not constant daily interaction, in the way you can with Dropbox for instance. Offline caching is of course one major aspect, but also I presume lots of error handling hidden in the background for smooth operation.

[cbh34680]

Thank you for your comment. I'm surprised to see such interest in what I'm doing. As this is just a personal hobby, it's difficult to make rapid progress, but I will try to develop it as much as possible.