Emulation allows to use the virtual disk as an hard drive or a network drive integrated into the operating system. This will give you a fully online storage medium accessible from multiple machines.
Here is a selection of free emulators and how to set them to work with your virtual disk.
FTP Drive is the lightest of the three presented emulators. It creates a folder for each FTP space. The whole is placed in a network drive.
Once the program installed, run it. Like any emulator running, you have direct access to the program in the status box (right of the taskbar).
If you want to automatically start the emulator each time you start Windows, check Autostart with Windows.
To mount your FTP space, uncheck the boxes Try retrieve from local NetView and Try retrieve from NetView Client-Server. Empty fields Host, Port, Login and Password. Click Edit list servers manually.
In the left area, you can delete the lists of sites found by selecting them and clicking Delete site. To mount a space, complete the following fields to the right area:
Display name: name as you want your disk
Server host: e-nautia.com
Login user: your login
Login password: your password
Files names encoding: UTF8
Secure connection: let Server does not support FTPS if you do not want to encrypt exchanges. Otherwise, put Explicit TLS.
Leave the other fields as they are and click Add site. You can repeat this operation if you want to mount an additional FTP space.
Click OK and OK again.
If all went well, you can find your new drive in Computer in Windows.
Gladinet Cloud Desktop (Free Starter Edition) has the advantage of being compatible with competing systems without FTP. Its disadvantages are the lack of encryption in the free version and the (very) bad management of special characters.
During installation, when the Add Storage step, check FTP and click Next.
In the line Label for Gladinet Drive, you can customize the name of your disk by clicking on Edit. Click Finish.
In Computer, the network disk was added. But it is not properly configured. Double-click FTP. A dialog box offers settings.
Server: ftp://e-nautia.com
User name: your login
Password: your password
Click Next, then Finish.
NetDrive is free for home use. NetDriver will mount your FTP space as an hard drive.
Once installed, run the program. Click New Site. Enter a name, e-nautia for example. Validate the name by Enter and complete the following fields:
Site IP or URL: e-nautia.com
Drive: choose a drive letter
Account: your login
Password: your password
Click Advanced, select UTF-8 in Encoding and click OK to avoid problems with special characters.
You can check Automatic login when system starts and Automatic login when NetDriver starts to run automatically emulation respectively at the Windows start and the software.
You can enable encryption by clicking Advanced, on line SSL, select Force SSL for all communication and click OK.
Click Save, then Connect.
