Wrapping and combining drives

Most backends talk to a storage service. A few, which this site calls wrapping drives, store nothing themselves: they sit on top of one or more of your other drives and change how those look or behave. You point them at another drive with a value like gdrive: or gdrive:Photos/2026, the drive’s name, a colon and an optional folder.

Wrapping drives need CloudMount Pro.

Backend	What it does	Typical use
Alias	Shows a folder of another drive as a drive of its own.	Put one deep folder at the top level of the Files app or Explorer.
Union	Merges several drives or folders into one view, with rules for where new files go.	Several free accounts as one large drive.
Combine	Shows several drives as top-level folders of one drive.	All your Google shared drives in one place.
Crypt	Encrypts names and contents.	Private files on any provider. See Encrypted drives.
Chunker	Splits large files into pieces.	Providers with a file size limit. Experimental.
Compress	Compresses files with gzip or zstd.	Large text files and logs. Experimental.
Hasher	Keeps checksums for providers that have none.	Integrity checks on FTP or WebDAV. Experimental.
Archive	Shows .zip and .sqfs archives on a drive as read-only folders.	Open one file from a large archive without downloading all of it.
Cache	rclone’s old caching layer.	Deprecated in rclone; avoid it.

How to set one up

1. Add the drives to wrap first.
2. Add a drive and choose the wrapping backend.
3. Fill in remote with the drive to wrap. On Android, a drive picker fills it in; on Windows, type the name followed by a colon, such as gdrive:. Union and Combine take upstreams instead, which you type yourself: drives separated by spaces for Union, such as gdrive: dropbox:Shared, and name=drive:path pairs for Combine, such as photos=gdrive:Photos docs=dropbox:Docs. Combine drives builds a Union for you: on Android, the Combine your drives card on the home screen; on Windows, More ways to add on the Add a drive page.

Things to know

• Capabilities follow the wrapped drives. A union of a Google Drive and an SFTP server can only do what both can, so server-side copy, checksums and free space may be missing. Each wrapping backend’s page explains the rules.
• Renaming or removing a wrapped drive breaks the wrapper, because the wrapper refers to it by name. Update the wrapper’s settings afterwards. A combined drive’s settings list its members and mark the missing ones.
• Wrappers can be stacked, such as a crypt drive on top of a union.
• Don’t show both the wrapper and the wrapped drive if you can help it. The same files then appear twice, and on Windows each copy is downloaded and synced separately.