Files.com Desktop App

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Press Play on the video player above to view this training video. The video script is presented below if you prefer to read.

Your staff has important work to do, so reducing the friction they experience from their tools is always a win. We help with that by providing multiple ways to connect to and interact with your Files.com site. One of the favorites among our customers is our Files.com Desktop App. This is a Windows and Mac OS app that integrates with your computer's file system.

You can find download links to this app and information about how to use it right here on our document site.

Let's go ahead and install the Windows version right now and have a look at how this works. Simply click the link for the version that you want, And then download the installer file. That will download quickly. Then you can open that and begin the installation process.

Mac and Windows both install very easily. But for now we'll just do the Windows install. The installer will lead you through the process, just follow the prompts. Click OK. And here you go.

Now you do have to restart after installing the Windows version. When you do, you may find that there is a software update. We do update this app frequently. Go ahead and install the update, and when that's done, we're ready to start using the app.

Now after the initial install, the first thing is we're going to have to do is launch the app for the first time. Search for Files.com in your start menu. Then launch the app. Now, once the app is launched, you'll see the icon in your system tray, and here you can choose about [see video] to see which version you are running. You can also check for updates here, and since we just updated, you'll see that it's up to date.

Now if we go back to the app icon, we can also look at our preferences and see what's available. There are two synchronization modes: smart and online. You can also change your connection settings here. If you need to throttle bandwidth, you can do that. But we'll leave it on unlimited for now. And here are the different updates that you can do. So we're going to leave it on release because those are stable releases. And finally, if you want to change the language of the app, you can do that here as well. But we're going to leave it set on the default.

The next thing that we have to do is connect our Files.com account to the app. We're going to sign in with a user that we already have on Files.com. You can give a nickname to this connection, and you'll see that we've got the server name already in place. Enter your username, and then enter your password. Now click Connect. And here we are.

We're looking at our Files Explorer. These are two folders that this user has permission to, so we can work with these folders in the same way we work with any folders in our file system. And you'll see that the Files.com connection is also available right in the file explorer view.

Let's experiment a little bit. We'll create a new folder on our desktop, and we're going to give that a name. Then we're going to drop some files into our new folder. So we're just using our normal Windows file system right now, but we do have our connection established via the desktop app to Files.com.

So let's drag a couple of test files in there just for experimentation purposes. Here are two files we've got stored in a folder on our desktop. Now let's go back to the Files.com app. We can see the connection there and the green ball indicates that it's active. So choosing show will take us right back through the file explorer to the folders that we have. Let's open this one which is on our Files.com site. You can also see this in our locations area.

One thing you typically might do is move folders and files into another folder that you have in your file system, so let's try that with the desktop app. Now let's take a look using our web browser to see what the result is. And there it is; there's the folder that we just uploaded. And these are the screenshot files that we just put into that folder on our desktop.

So you can see you drop it into that folder, and it's quickly uploaded to your Files.com site. And you can see from the status icons attached to the folders here, what the status of is of each individual folder and file.

Now let's right click and try the context menu to see what else we can do.

This option allows us to keep a copy on the local disk all the time. And this option allows us to make sure that files are not stored locally on our local drive, but only in the cloud. Let's have this one always stored locally. So we're keeping a copy of our file physically on our local C:\ drive here.

Now, you can do that with files, and you can also do that with folders. So if we right click on this folder, go back to that same context menu for Files.com we can choose keep offline on local drive. So this allows us to make sure even if we're disconnected from the internet, for some reason, we go into airplane mode etc, we always have these two files available to open in use in full.

Let's try Airplane Mode real quick. Now we've got our Wi Fi turned off and are now no longer connected to the internet. If we go back into our File Explorer, there are our drives, we can click on that [mounted Files.com drive]. Go back into this folder and you can see the green checkmark. I can see that these files exist, but the cloud tells me that they're only available to open and work with if I'm online.[see video] But the green checkmark tells me that I have my files available to work with locally.

Okay, let's switch gears here and take a look at the Mac OS version real quick. We already have this installed here. So just to launch it the first time go to your launch pad and click to launch the app. And you'll see that in this case, we log in via a web browser, so I'm going to follow the prompts here. I enter my username and password. This is very similar to logging into the web client. Once I log in, I get a message that says I can close the browser. My Finder window will open right up, and you can see here we have the same folders that we were just working with. These are on my Files.com site and also available here through the Finder windows and folders. I can work with them just the same way as if I were doing any other file operations on my Mac, very similar to how we did that in Windows.

Let's log back into our site here. Now that we're on this machine. I'm going to login with the same user using the web browser that I have connected with my desktop app. Let's open up and compare. You can see the same folders available here. And if we open those, we see the same folders. They're all very easy to work with.

You can also see that we have the context menu using a Ctrl-click or right-click if you happen to have a mouse on your Mac that allows that. You can use that to do the same things that we did on Windows. You can select files and folders to be either stored locally or only stored in the cloud if you have smart sync mode set in your preferences. You can see where the icon displays to show you the status.

Let's see what happens if we delete these files from our Files.com site on the web. Let's go back and refresh now. This is our app menu in the Finder; it's integrated, so we're going to do a reload, and now the files are gone. So just like the Windows version, any folder and file operations that you do on your Mac finder, you can also do using the desktop app.

If you have any questions, please feel free to Contact Us or give us a call at 1-800-286-8372.