Connected folders
Point a collection at a Google Drive or SharePoint folder and let it keep itself up to date.
Instead of uploading documents by hand, you can point a collection at a folder you already keep in Google Drive or SharePoint. Asteria mirrors it and keeps it current.
When this is the right choice
When the folder is already the place your team puts things. Your colleagues carry on saving files where they always have, and the collection follows along. Nobody has to remember a second upload step, which is the step everybody forgets.
Connecting a folder
You need your account linked first, under Profile then Connections. If it is not, Asteria will tell you and point you there.
Then, on the collection, choose Sync from a folder, paste the folder's link or ID, and click Preview. You get a count and total size of what it found, so you can check you have the right folder before committing. Confirm with Sync this folder and the first sync starts.
A connected collection becomes read-only. You cannot upload or delete documents in Asteria Cloud any more, because the folder decides what the collection holds. Add and remove files in Drive or SharePoint instead.
Living with it
The header shows the folder name, a Synced folder badge, and when it last looked ("Checked 51 minutes ago"). It checks periodically on its own. Sync now forces a check if you have just added something and do not want to wait.
The three things that interrupt a sync
"Paused, this folder grew a lot." You approved a folder of 40 files and it now holds 4,000. Nothing new is added until you look. This is a deliberate brake: a folder that grows by two orders of magnitude is usually somebody reorganising a shared drive, and silently ingesting all of it would cost real money and fill your storage. Check it is what you expect, then Confirm and resume.
"Sync paused, connection lost." Your linked account stopped working, usually because the password changed or the permission was withdrawn. Documents already collected stay searchable. Reconnect to resume.
"Could not read that folder." Usually you do not have access to it, or the link points at a file rather than a folder.
Disconnecting
Stop syncing ends the mirroring, and the documents already collected are kept. The collection becomes an ordinary one again that you can upload to and delete from.
So disconnecting is safe: it does not empty the collection.
What Asteria writes back
If Asteria produces a deliverable destined for a connected collection, it writes it into the Drive or SharePoint folder, not into Asteria Cloud, and it arrives in the collection on the next sync. See Letting Asteria file its own work.