The five cloud accounts problem

A freelance designer opens her laptop on a Wednesday morning and watches five sync clients race for attention. Google Drive is uploading something for the work account. Dropbox is pulling down a 2 GB folder the client just shared. OneDrive is asking if she wants to enable Files On-Demand again. Box is showing a red error icon she's been ignoring for a week. The personal Drive client is complaining about disk space. Free space on a brand-new 512 GB MacBook: 14 GB. She closes the laptop, opens it again, and the five clients start over.

This post is about the workflow that some prosumers have quietly figured out instead. Mount each cloud account as a drive. Files appear in Finder instantly, but the bytes only download when you actually open a file. Disk consumed at rest: roughly zero. The cloud accounts stop fighting each other for storage and start behaving like the network drives they always wanted to be.

The actual disk math

Sync clients consume disk in proportion to what they sync. The default is "everything," and the math gets ugly fast. A realistic prosumer setup:

• Personal Google Drive: 50 GB of photos, documents, and the random scans accumulated over the years.
• Work Google Drive: 80 GB of project files, client deliverables, and the team's shared assets.
• Client's Dropbox (shared folder): 120 GB of source materials, raw footage, working files.
• Box library: 200 GB. (Box's free tier is small; this is an Enterprise account where the company gave you the whole shared library.)
• S3 bucket: 40 GB of long-tail archives.

Total: 490 GB. On a 512 GB laptop, that leaves 22 GB free, which OS X plus a handful of installed applications will consume within a week. On a 1 TB laptop, you've burned half your disk on stuff you barely touch.

The workaround everyone tries first is selective sync. Each client has its own UI for picking which folders to keep local. Drive has Stream-vs-Mirror at the account level and selective sync at the folder level. Dropbox has Selective Sync and Smart Sync. OneDrive has Files On-Demand. Box has Box Drive. Five different UIs, five different mental models, five different sets of icons in Finder.

A few weeks in, you've made selective-sync choices once, and you've forgotten which folder is local and which isn't. You sit down on a plane, open a file that's marked with the cloud icon, and watch it fail. You make it back to a connection, mark a few more folders for offline, and the disk-math problem starts over.

The web-UI escape hatch doesn't work either

The other workaround is don't sync anything, just use the web. This works for cloud-native workflows — collaborative document editing in Google Docs, light file management in the Drive web UI, viewing shared folders without opening them. It falls apart the moment you need a real local tool to touch the file.

Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Excel, Logic Pro, your code editor, your video transcoder, your CAD tool — all of them want local files. Most of them have some cloud integration (Photoshop has Creative Cloud sync, Premiere has team projects), but those integrations only work with the cloud the tool's vendor partners with. Adobe doesn't open files from Dropbox; Premiere doesn't open files from Box. The web UI for each cloud has a "download this file" button, and a workflow built on clicking "download this file" thirty times a day is not a workflow.

So the prosumer's choice is: sync everything and run out of disk, sync selectively and lose track, or use the web and lose the tools. None of these is good. The default state of a multi-cloud prosumer is a bunch of unhappy compromises.

What mounting does instead

Mount each cloud account as a drive. The disk math changes shape:

• The drive shows up in Finder (or Explorer on Windows, or /Volumes on Mac, /mnt on Linux) immediately.
• All folders and files appear as if they were local. Metadata is cached so the UI feels instant.
• Bytes are not downloaded until something opens the file. The 2 GB folder the client shared doesn't consume 2 GB of disk; it consumes its directory metadata, which is kilobytes.
• When Photoshop opens photo.psd from the mount, the file streams down at open-time. When you close it, the local cache eventually expires and the disk space comes back.

At rest, five mounted accounts consume roughly zero disk space. Active, they consume only the working set you've opened recently.

Pin-for-offline is the escape valve for the cases where you genuinely need a file local. Mark the active client project as offline, mark the current quarter's invoices as offline, and the bytes stay resident even when you're disconnected. The pinned set is explicit — you chose it — so you don't end up surprised on a plane.

Same workflow across all five accounts. One install (ExpanDrive on Mac, Windows, or Linux), one connection per account, one consistent set of behaviors. No more "what does the green check mean in OneDrive vs the blue cloud in Dropbox vs the gray dot in Drive." All mounts behave the same.

Concrete: what changes day to day

A few specific behaviors that change once the sync clients are gone:

Application open dialogs. When you open a file from Photoshop, the open dialog shows all five clouds as drives. Pick the file, Photoshop opens it. No "wait for sync to finish" step. No "I see this file in the web UI but not in Finder" confusion. The mount is in the OS file picker because it is a real OS drive.

Spotlight and Finder search. Searches against the mount return results across the cloud accounts the same way they return results from local files. The pin-for-offline subset is fully indexed locally; the rest of the mount can be searched through the cloud provider's own search API surfaced through the mount.

Quicklook and previews. Hit space on a file in Finder; the preview shows up the same as for local files. Quick-look is a streaming read, so it's fast even for large files where you only want the first few hundred KB to render.

Disk usage in the Finder sidebar. Each mount shows the cloud account's total used and remaining quota, not your laptop's disk. Five clouds visible side by side, each with its real remaining capacity, and your laptop's local disk stays nearly full because you stopped duplicating cloud content onto it.

Drag-and-drop between clouds. Drag a file from the Dropbox mount to the Drive mount. The mount handles the copy through the source provider's API on the read side and the destination provider's API on the write side. The whole operation happens in the background; you don't manage it.

Honest about the edges

A few real cases where the mount pattern is not the right call:

One cloud account is fine on its native sync client. If you only have a personal Google Drive and that's it, install the Google Drive app. It works, it's free, and the disk math isn't a problem at a single account. ExpanDrive earns its slot when the account count gets to two or three or more and the friction of multiple sync clients starts compounding. At one account, the friction isn't there.

Latency on writes is real for very-tight-loop workflows. A native sync client writes locally and uploads in the background; a mount writes through to the cloud and the write isn't acknowledged until the cloud accepts it. For most workflows the difference is invisible. For very latency-sensitive cases (a local database file accessed thousands of times a second, a video transcoder writing 4K frames at line rate) you'd pin the working file offline anyway, which gets you back to local-disk speed.

Browser-based collaborative editing still happens in the browser. Google Docs in Drive, Word Online in OneDrive, Figma in Figma — these are web-native editors and the mount doesn't change anything about them. You still edit them through the browser. The mount is for the tools that want local files, not the tools that already work in the browser. The two complement each other; the mount doesn't replace the browser-native workflow.

Some sync clients have features the mount doesn't. Dropbox Smart Sync's pinning UI is genuinely good. Google Drive's Backup-and-Sync of your Desktop folder is a different feature from a mount. If you specifically rely on one of those, you'd keep that sync client and use the mount for the other four accounts. The pattern is "use the mount for the accounts where the mount wins," not "rip out everything."

Trust the local disk for actual sensitive data. Files you genuinely don't want leaving the laptop should not be in the cloud. The mount doesn't change that calculus. Pin-for-offline keeps a copy local for performance, but the source of truth is still in the cloud account. This is the right model for prosumer assets; it's not the right model for a one-of-a-kind file you can't afford to have hit a cloud breach.

The setup, end to end

Five steps, not a project:

1. Install ExpanDrive. One installer, signed package, takes a minute. macOS, Windows, or Linux — same app, same UI.
2. Add each cloud account. Click new connection, pick the provider (Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, S3, the rest), authenticate. Repeat for each account. Each one becomes a drive in your file manager.
3. Pin the folders you need offline. For each account, mark the folders you actively work in as "keep offline." That subset stays local for performance and availability; the rest streams on demand.
4. Stop the native sync clients. Quit Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box. They were duplicating the cloud content onto your laptop; that's the disk you're trying to get back. The mount replaces them.
5. Reclaim the local disk. Delete the local sync folders the clients were maintaining. (Make sure pin-for-offline is set up for anything you need before you do this.) On a 512 GB laptop, the typical recovery is 300-400 GB of disk space, instantly.

The whole transition is twenty minutes. The change is permanent the moment you stop the old sync clients.

What to do next

Try it on one cloud first. Add ExpanDrive, mount your most-storage-heavy cloud account, work against it for a day. If the workflow holds up — files open when you click on them, applications find them in dialogs, you don't notice the difference between mounted and local — then move the next account, then the next.

Download ExpanDrive. The integrations page lists every cloud you can mount; the major five (Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, S3) cover roughly 95% of prosumer setups, and there are another forty or so for the long tail.