Personal Drives
Frame has built and integrated a variety of storage options into our platform to fit a multitude of unique use cases. This article covers the Personal Drive feature which provides persistent storage on a per-user basis. This storage space can be used as a cache to store frequently used files that will persist between a user's sessions.
Overview
Frame's Personal Drive is a storage solution that provides each authenticated user with individually allocated storage space. The capacity of this storage space is specified by the administrator of the account and can be scaled as needed. The drive is accessible from “My Computer” within the session and appears as the “P” drive letter. Drives are automatically provisioned as new users are added to the account. When users return to their accounts and launch sessions, their stateless instances mount their unique drive. When a user's session ends, the Personal Drive is disconnected from the stateless instance. The Personal Drive is only available to the authenticated user and is not shared with any other user.
Enable Personal Drives
Setting up Personal Drives for your users is simple and can be done with only a few clicks.
First, from the Dashboard of your account, click on the Settings link on the left-hand side. If you are using AWS as your cloud service provider, click the Availability zones tab. If you are using a different cloud provider, move on to step 2. Under Availability zones, enable the Use a single availability zone toggle and select your desired AZ (availability zone).
Use a Single Availability Zone notePersonal Drive's backend implementation through Frame varies depending on the cloud service provider. The implementation used for AWS requires administrators to specify an AZ because the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) resources must be accessible from the same availability zone as the VM pool.
Now select the “Personal Drives” tab from the Settings page. Click on the toggle to “Enable personal drives for all users.” Set the desired drive size for your users next to “Initial personal drive size” and click “Save” in the upper right corner.
Enable Personal Drives That's it! Your users will now be able to see an additional drive labeled “PersonalDisk (P:)” from their file explorer. This drive can be used and accessed just like any other drive.
Personal Drive P: in Windows Explorer
Disable Personal Drives
You can stop using Personal Drives at anytime by going to Settings > Personal Drives and disabling the Enable Personal Drives for all users toggle.
When you click Save, you will be asked to confirm the disablement of personal drives.
When you click on Confirm, Frame will backup and then delete the personal drives. If you select Cancel, then the Personal Drive feature will remain enabled.
If you are sure that you will not use Personal Drives in the future, be sure to delete all of the personal drive volumes before disabling the Personal Drives feature to avoid any unnecessary backups of the personal drive volumes.
When you re-enable Personal Drives, you can selectively restore personal drive backups for specific users from Volumes > Backup.
Delete Personal Drives
Administrators can delete volumes at any time. Simply navigate to the “Volumes” tab on the “Settings” page of your Dashboard and click the ellipsis next to the volume you would like to delete. Click on the checkbox to delete all backups associated with the selected volumes, if desired. Select “Delete.”
Please ensure that the volume status is “Detached” before you attempt to delete it.
When you delete a volume for a user, a new volume will be provisioned for that user upon the next session start. The new volume configuration will depend on the initial disk size setting at the time the session was launched. For example, if you update your “Initial Drive Size” setting to 7 GB and then delete a Personal Drive for a user, the user will be provisioned a new Personal Drive with a max storage capacity of 7 GB when they start a new session.
Adjust Storage Capacity
Administrators can make changes to the storage capacity settings and adjust their Personal Drives to scale automatically based on usage.
Initial Disk Size
The initial Personal Drive can be adjusted at any time by navigating to the “Settings” page in your Dashboard and clicking on the corresponding tab (“Personal Drives”).
Simply modify the value for "Initial Personal Drive Size" and click “Save.” When a user starts a session in this Frame account and does not have an existing Personal Drive, Frame will create a Personal Drive with the disk size specified by the updated Initial Personal Drive Size value. The setting will not be applied to any users who have an existing Personal Drive.
Autogrow Settings
If you anticipate that your users will need to regularly increase their Personal Drive storage capacity, you can set parameters for Frame to automatically scale up as needed. To do this, navigate to the Volumes page (which will appear in your Dashboard menu once you have enabled Enterprise Profiles or Personal Drives). Under the Volumes page, click on the kebab menu and select Autogrow settings. A new dialog box will appear:
Here, you can specify the threshold at which the disk size will automatically increase for established users. By default, the disk volume will automatically be increased by 1 GB when there is less than 0.25 GB of free space remaining. You can adjust these values as you see fit for your users.
You can enforce a maximum disk volume size by enabling the Limit maximum volume size slider and setting the Maximum volume size.
Be sure to click Confirm once you have adjusted the settings as desired.
Manage Backups
If you would like to implement backups for your volumes, check out the Backups section of our documentation.