I understand certain services such as Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive can mount cloud stores as drive letters. That could be convenient for transferring files.

A couple of things to bear in mind:

- How quickly do you need to save files to the cloud, or retrieve them? Typical business LANs these days are gigabit i.e. 1,000 Mbit/sec. Typical asymmetric business broadband might be 20 Mbit/sec download, 5 Mbit/sec (or less) upload. In that example file transfer speed from cloud to business would be less than 2% of LAN, and upload speed from business to cloud less than 1%.

- You may need or want to do the initial data transfer to the cloud via USB hard drive or tape. Uploading 150GB to the cloud over typical broadband upload speeds can take weeks or months

>Thanks Craig that makes sense. Although I had problems trying to get web services working in vfp in the past.
>Would you recommend file storage over blob storage? Currently about 300,000 folders, perhaps 1m files and 150Gb of storage used so far and 50,000 folders, 200,000 files and 30Gb added per year.
>We store all the files to do with a job in sub folder with the job number as part of the file name. We automatically create the folder and move the files as they are uploaded.
>\folder\12345\12345_20160129_172801.jpg
>\folder\12345\12345_20160129_172802.pdf
>
>~M
>
>>I would setup a web service in Azure that you call and then download the file. That way, the files can only be accessed through your application.
>>
>>
>>>Hi all,
>>>I'm trying to work out the possibility of storing files on the cloud, azure, instead of locally on the server. The client running out of space and adding hard drive capacity is not easy due to the server configuration.
>>>Currently they have lots of data about jobs in file format which are saved in a folder structure. I was hoping to save this to the cloud instead and access them via the link. So instead of the link having \\server\folder\job\file1.docx it would have \\azure.com\company\folder\job\file1.docx
>>>The one issue, and there are probably many, is that I can't have links work outside the ofice, they have a static ip, or else have a setup whereby I can send the link with the username and password but that the mink on it's own would not be enough to open the file. We can't have the users in the office enter a username and pasword each time as it would slo things down too much.
>>>Anyone knwo if this is possible, I read conflicting articles online so I'm not sure.
>>>~M