NetDrive vs RcloneView — Mount a Cloud or Move Between Clouds?
NetDrive and RcloneView both come from Bdrive but solve different problems. Learn when to mount cloud storage as a drive and when to transfer between clouds.
A designer asks for “that NetDrive thing” because the team’s footage lives in Wasabi and Premiere needs to open it from a drive letter. A sysadmin two desks over wants to copy 4 TB from Dropbox into Amazon S3 and never open a single file. Both requests get typed into the same search box, and both land on the same company’s website. They need different products.
Need the cloud as a drive?
NetDrive lets Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, SFTP, WebDAV and more appear as native drives on Windows and macOS — no syncing, no full downloads.
- Mount cloud storage as a native drive on Windows and macOS
- Open and save files from any app, no browser tab required
- Over 20 storage types in one Drive Manager
Free trial. Lifetime and subscription plans available.
Two Products, One Company, Different Jobs
Both NetDrive and RcloneView are made by Bdrive Inc. They are sister products, and they answer different questions.
NetDrive mounts cloud storage as a native drive. Google Drive, OneDrive, Amazon S3, SFTP, WebDAV and more show up in Windows Explorer or macOS Finder, and any application can open and save files there as if the disk were local. The files stay in the cloud. You work with them in place.
RcloneView is a cloud-to-cloud file management GUI. Its job is moving and organizing files between providers, such as copying a bucket’s contents into another service.
The short version: if you want to use files from a cloud, you want NetDrive. If you want to move files from one cloud to another, that is RcloneView’s territory, not NetDrive’s.
Side-by-Side
| Question | NetDrive | RcloneView |
|---|---|---|
| Main purpose | Mount a cloud as a drive | Manage and move files between clouds |
| Open a cloud file straight from an app | Yes, through the mounted drive | Not its purpose |
| Copy from one provider directly to another | No, use RcloneView for this | Yes, this is its core job |
| Appears in Explorer / Finder as a drive | Yes | No |
| Typical user | Editors, designers, developers, office teams | Admins migrating or consolidating storage |
This is a positioning comparison based on each product’s stated purpose. We have not benchmarked the two against each other, because they are not competing for the same task.
When NetDrive Is the Right Tool
Daily work against cloud files. A video editor with 800 GB of 4K masters in Backblaze B2 does not want to download a project before opening it. Mounted as a drive, the footage opens from the editing app. See Video Editing from 4K RAW in Cloud Storage for that workflow.
Mixed storage in one place. NetDrive’s Drive Manager holds many connections side by side, each with its own drive type: network drive, read-only drive, local disk, or removable drive.
Team access. Team licenses let an admin publish team drives to members, and file locking helps stop two people from overwriting the same file. Our team drive guide walks through it.
When You Need Something Else
NetDrive is not a sync or migration tool. It does not copy a file from Google Drive straight to S3, and it does not run scheduled transfers between providers. If you are consolidating accounts, retiring a service, or replicating a bucket, reach for RcloneView.
NetDrive also has no offline mode and no client-side encryption. A mounted drive needs a connection to the provider, and files are protected by whatever the provider offers.
Can You Use Both?
Yes, and plenty of teams do. A common split: RcloneView handles the one-time migration of an old archive into a new provider, then NetDrive mounts the destination so people can work with the files day to day.
Wrap-up
Pick by verb. Open, edit, save points to NetDrive; copy, move, migrate between clouds points to RcloneView. To see NetDrive’s side in practice, start with Mount Amazon S3 on Windows, or compare it with another mounting tool in NetDrive vs Mountain Duck. On a phone, NetDrive Desktop vs Mobile explains how the mobile app differs.
— Alex, NetDrive