23 ms·

Dropbox Project Infinite

743 points by maguay 10y ago

owenwil 10y ago
All I can say is: Finally. What took so long?
pwenzel 10y ago
Any hints as to when this feature will be rolled out?
rethab 10y ago
Mac and Windows means 'universal compatibility'? :(
- _kyran 10y ago
  To be fair, that's a decent start. Especially if you're looking at prioritising where your customer base is. Linux is important, but nowhere near as much in comparison for the average consumer/business.
  - noja 10y ago
    It is a very decent start, it's just not "universal".
  - zymhan 10y ago
    Dropbox is disproportionately popular with Linux users though, given their great Linux clients.
    - philjohn 10y ago
      That's as may be, however, what % of their users are on Linux is the question they needed to answer when deciding on initial platform support. Linux is also a much larger target than Mac OS or Windows ... different filesystems, desktop environments etc. etc.
      - pmontra 10y ago
        "different filesystems": maybe not. This new Dropbox thing is a network filesystem so it could just use normal syscalls to read and write files on any filesystem the ~/Dropbox directory and be (local) filesystem agnostic. After all you can bypass the problem by running a Windows VM in VirtualBox with guest additions and a shared filesystem. Is another way to map the Windows Dropbox's network filesystem to the Linux one, whatever it is. Still, very cumbersome and probably slow. I remember not stellar performances with sharing files between host and guest OSes in that way. Hopefully Dropbox will release the API and somebody will write a user mode filesystem to interface this new service.
      - pritambaral 10y ago
        > different filesystems You're looking at the wrong end of it. Dropbox doesn't have to deal with any filesystem, Dropbox instead needs to build a filesystem. It doesn't have to deal with any filesystem because Linux abstracts it. The same abstraction allows it to build its own filesystem really, really easily. How easy? I wrote, mounted, and used a filesystem in less than fifteen minutes. In node.js. It's that easy. > desktop environments Dropbox doesn't need to support various desktop environments, just a stable API for the desktop environments (actually, just file managers) to use. Isn't this how Nautilus, Thunar, Dolphin et al. already support Dropbox's existing features?
    - michaelmior 10y ago
      That may be true compared to other synchronization solutions on Linux, but I doubt Linux users make up a disproportionate amount of their customer base.
      - zymhan 10y ago
        No, but it would be a marked shift in their attitude towards Linux if they just never brought cool new features to it. Not saying they're doing that here, I'm sure it'll take time to implement.
      - noja 10y ago
        Linux users evangelise Dropbox more than other users.
    - codezero 10y ago
      I expect their revenue isn't disproportionately from Linux users though.
- NikhilVerma 10y ago
  I think it's an unfortunate situation resulting from the need to be realistic about releases. If something can be released now for > 90% of the users then companies will prioritise doing that and then releasing the remaining 10% later. The problem is when that remaining 10% takes way longer than expected.
  - pritambaral 10y ago
    Or never :( Looking at you Google Drive.
  - teach 10y ago
    And even though I've been a happy Linux user for more than a decade, 10% is very generous. Especially since this is only part of their Business product for now.
- batat 10y ago
  Meh... https://github.com/joe42/CloudFusion https://github.com/joe42/CloudFusion
_kyran 10y ago
This is huge. The biggest reason for me to not store more content on dropbox, is that it always comes with the trade-off of taking up space on my local drive (128gb) as well. Sure there's selective sync, but that's an all-or nothing approach. I like the way Google approaches this with their Google Photos service. X most recent photos are stored locally, and everything else is pulled down on the fly as you search/browse for them.
- bluesilver07 10y ago
  >> X most recent photos are stored locally, and everything else is pulled down on the fly as you search/browse for them. Which app are you talking about? The desktop app is merely an uploader. It doesn't really sync photos.
  - _kyran 10y ago
    The Android app
  - y4mi 10y ago
    urm, its been in the desktop client for over a year now... it randomly indexed all my wallpapers and threw them all into my timeline... i'm still not finished with the resulting cleanup. though it might have been Google Picasa desktop app, i used both back then
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Apple does something similar in Photos on iOS.
  - stephenr 10y ago
    On OS X too.
  - samf 10y ago
    Not disagreeing, but I'm not seeing that on my wife's iphone. She got a 16 gig phone (big mistake), but we were thinking that getting everything on iCloud would make up for this. We pay every month for iCloud storage. That's not what we're seeing. Her phone gets to be 100% full, and deleting a photo frees up space. When we delete a photo, we get dire warnings that "this will delete the photo on all of your devices, and in the cloud too." I download them to my computer before doing this, so nothing is really lost. But it's annoying.
altharaz 10y ago
This is a very good news for our tiny laptops with just 128GB hard drive. Next step: migrate 100% of the OS in the Cloud?
doque 10y ago
I'm guessing this will only be available for Business subscriptions?
- zimpenfish 10y ago
  Certainly reads that way with all the talk of teams.
- sensecall 10y ago
  I was wondering the same thing. Been desperately wanting this feature for a long time – are there any other services offering it?
fnordsensei 10y ago
This has been one of the pros of using BT Sync for a while now. Good to see that more tools are getting it.
Spooky23 10y ago
This is pretty amazing... This could dramatically improve our ability to deliver VDI and other emerging user experiences. How do you get a hold of a high level salesperson at Dropbox?
djhworld 10y ago
Does the dropbox API support s3 like operations where you can download byte ranges etc?
- seanieb 10y ago
  Yes. They've supported it since V1 AFIK. https://www.dropbox.com/developers-v1/core/docs#files-GET https://www.dropbox.com/developers-v1/core/docs#files-GET
imaginenore 10y ago
So it's a mounted SSH drive with some local caching? Like SSHFS?
- nowbacktowork 10y ago
  More like WebDAV, but yeah. This is what jungle disk did when it was first released.
  - seanieb 10y ago
    This isn't the case here.
    - nowbacktowork 10y ago
      So probably something similar to eldos cbfs/dokan backed by a filesystem cache db so the crud operations do not need to hit the backend?
- seanieb 10y ago
  AFIK this is not implemented using the usual SSHFS/FUSE approach. This is something new. Edit: More details here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11571640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11571640
  - gkya 10y ago
    It is either a kernel-mode filesystem, or a user-mode. I dont think that this is possible with an other approach, but IDK that well win32 and mac.
- detaro 10y ago
  SSHFS has selectable local caching and automatic sync of those cached files?
- hemancuso 10y ago
  It's a filesystem filter driver
jorangreef 10y ago
How is this implemented on Windows vs OS X?
- dkopi 10y ago
  It can't. This is the type of features that have to be developed for each OS separately.
  - jorangreef 10y ago
    Yes, that's what's I meant, how would you develop it on Windows vs OS X etc? What options are available on those platforms?
    - dkopi 10y ago
      I don't know how dropbox has actually implemented this, and I'm not sure about OSX, But on windows you might use a kernel file system filter driver or a shell namespace extension: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc144095(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc1... This looks like an open source project that provides something similar for google drive: https://github.com/google/google-drive-shell-extension https://github.com/google/google-drive-shell-extension On linux this could probably be even easier, just mounting a directory to a remote NFS server.
      - hemancuso 10y ago
        If you look in the Dropbox install the driver is already being distributed on Mac and Windows. It's a filter driver.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- gkya 10y ago
  My first guess is decoupled drivers with an abstraction that the actual dropbox client service uses. One driver for windows, one for mac. Though I don't know if you can do user mode filesystems on those, but there is this: https://dokan-dev.github.io/ https://dokan-dev.github.io/ Or else they may have used some fs event notification library to intercept access to files, but I think that would be harder (impossible? IDK win32/mac) to do than a filesystem.
yoz-y 10y ago
The word 'revolutionary' definitely deprecated in the past years. Anyways, this is great news as I'll no longer have to default to the website search for selectively non-synced files.
- dharma1 10y ago
  Agreed re:selective sync. This seems so much obviously better solution, wonder why it wasn't there before
- michaelmior 10y ago
  Do you mean depreciated?
  - yoz-y 10y ago
    I do indeed!
bobsoap 10y ago
This sounds like the exact feature I've been desperately looking for, for quite some time now, watching Microsoft discontinue online-only files in Onedrive because "it confused customers", and shaking my head at the blatant lack of this kind of thing everywhere... Until just recently, when I found odrive[1]. Not affiliated with them in any way, just a fan - if you don't want to wait until Dropbox decides to launch this publicly, check it out. It works with Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive/CreativeCloud/what-have-you and does exactly what Dropbox Infinite promises to do, except that it's seasoned, working, practically bug-free (that I can tell), and, well, available now. [1] https://www.odrive.com/ https://www.odrive.com/
- degenerate 10y ago
  $99/year ($8.25/mo) to have "Premium" which offers the option to leave files in the cloud and sync on demand. This is too much money to gain a feature addition. No thanks.
  - bobsoap 10y ago
    Interesting... I just checked and apparently I'm on a grandfathered free plan that can still unsync. Didn't know they changed it. For me, it's still more than just a feature addition though - I use odrive for all my cloud storage accounts. It's all under one roof. Your mileage may vary, of course.
  - pmontra 10y ago
    Yeah, only if customers pay that for me and as long as they pay. I don't have that many files on my own.
- JBiserkov 10y ago
  Microsoft had what they called "placeholders" and it worked great, but it did confuse some users who looked for a file, saw it was "there" and happily went offline. Only to find it was only a placeholder. Furthermore, on devices with limited storage (phones, tablets) even the small size of the placeholders becomes a problem when the number of files is big enough. So Microsoft temporarily removed the placeholders functionality, promising to bring it back in the near future using some new (at the time not yet invented?) technique that would solve the problem.
fulafel 10y ago
The cloud "wheel of reinvention" revolves to bring AFS to the masses? Or is this just showing the files using a file manager plugin, not visible as a real filesystem? edit: working at the FS level according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11571640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11571640 - good job Dropbox! Anyone know if it's also supported on Linux?
sashk 10y ago
Finally. But for me it's too late.
andr 10y ago
I really hope this is available to personal accounts, and not only business, as the blog post sort of implies. With the average laptop being 256GB and the Dropbox paid account being 1TB, that's badly needed.
- carlmcqueen 10y ago
  I was thinking this as well. I have been really frustrated with selective sync because of how long the process takes to check the folders that make sense on each computer.
JorgeGT 10y ago
This sounds awesome, but with all the talk about drag files, double click, etc., I wonder if this will work from the command line?
- michaelmior 10y ago
  I don't see why not. I assume they're managing all of this at the file system level.
gkya 10y ago
Oh my marketing, isn't this basically NFS?
- arethuza 10y ago
  A reasonable question - it was my initial reaction. However, from what I recall of how NFS worked it didn't sync anything locally - if it was remote it stayed remote. This seems to be an interesting hybrid.
- dagw 10y ago
  NFS with selective offline caching and automatic re-syncing upon reconnetion. NFS never really did that. AFS and Coda kind of tried, I don't recall it working that well. Plus all the other basic Dropbox features
- pjc50 10y ago
  No. NFS requires a continuously online connection and pulls the metadata over it, so you have to wait for `ls` and `stat`. Caching in NFS is quite limited, and of course its authentication and network-traversal problems are hard work to deal with.
dkyc 10y ago
At first I thought "Well, Dropbox storage is 5x as expensive as hard drive space, so what's the point?". What I didn't see was the team use case: It's actually brilliant to have access to every document of all of my colleagues at all times, without saving all that stuff locally, or taking forever sync. This is really amazing. The problem with our current shared team folders is that you need to make a deliberate effort to share something with the team. That means when you want to pull information from the shared space, you're very likely to get an outdated copy. Thanks to 1.) no storage constraints and 2.) deep OS-integration, all files can actually be always up-to-date with Dropbox Infinite. That really sounds cool.
- padiyar83 10y ago
  > ..or taking forever sync. This is really amazing. I don't think this solves the problem of taking forever to sync. Nothing has changed there. You are still bound by the same data retrieval and network latencies to get the file stored in a datacenter somewhere to you. That one is a harder problem to crack because it needs a lot of infra investment in expanding your content delivery footprint and replace SSD's with something much faster, like flash.
  - Mtinie 10y ago
    This solves an important aspect of the sync problem -- the ability to selectively sync individual files without having to sync the whole directory that it is part of (or even to have to know what the directory is in advance).
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      Dropbox has actually had Selective Sync for years. The whole part about the metadata being cached locally and a seamless experience at file system level is new though. https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/4456 https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/4456
      - Mtinie 10y ago
kyriakos 10y ago
Microsoft had this feature built in windows 8 / 8.1 and removed it in Windows 10 cause it "confused" customers. Hope this will nudge them to bring it back.
- pjc50 10y ago
  It's removed in 10? That's kind of a disaster, as it's critical to making the Surface and various tablets usable.
  - kyriakos 10y ago
    It removed "placeholders" and added a selective Sync feature but its not the same. Placeholders experience felt more intuitive. Files that were only available online were marked so you know. I guess the problem started cause a lot of users would not be able to access files when offline and started complaining to their support service. Too bad though I loved that feature.
- pca 10y ago
  I think they'll bring it back in the summer, but didn't find a more recent source than this: https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/microsoft-consumer-services/onedrive/63140/onedrive-placeholders-to-return-with-redstone https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/microsoft-consumer-services/o...
brodo 10y ago
Dropbox is pretty overpriced compared to OneCloud. If they don't solve that I'm not going to switch back.
- danieldk 10y ago
  I disagree. While it is true that it is more expensive per GB, Dropbox has a lot of features that make it more fit for heavy lifting, such as: * Chunked uploads. Try to modify a 1GB file in OneDrive. The complete file will be resynchronized. Dropbox just uploads the chunks that have changed. * LAN sync. If you are sharing files with family/colleagues that are on the same network, Dropbox shares file chunks peer to peer. This usually results in much faster synchronisation than downloading from the cloud. * Dropbox has file requests. People can upload files to your Dropbox, but what others upload is not visible. * In my experience, the Dropbox client is a lot more stable than the OneDrive client on OS X. OneDrive crashes or sometimes cannot sync certain files. To me the speediness, file requests, and more reliability is well worth whatever the price delta is. (Note: I have both, but I only use OneDrive as an endpoint for Arq backups.)
aroman 10y ago
To those of you who are dismissing this because AFS/NFS has had this for years, the point is that this is running over the Internet, not your local network.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- fulafel 10y ago
  AFS worked pretty well over the internet, WAN was an important use case. But it was just an early one (1988!), many others followed. Coda, SFS, recently BackFS for FUSE, Sun's CacheFS and Red Hat's FS-Cache for NFS etc etc.
gumby 10y ago
If they can make a remote Spotlight index of the cloud content for Mac users then it really would be seamless. Hope they do it.
- Angostura 10y ago
  Lets see how it copes with a nice big Photos.app library
- kccqzy 10y ago
  Not likely because you can use your own spotlight importers.
CamatHN 10y ago
My original thought was, so its a network drive huh? But when you think about the fact that everyone has 128GB Surfaces they take everywhere remotely this is really powerful and I can image a lot easier to administer. Love how they have integrated and just added a simple icon. Well done Dropbox
- fapjacks 10y ago
  "the fact that everyone has 128GB Surfaces" This seems vaguely astroturfy.
mahyarm 10y ago
I will curious about the performance. SSHFS/FUSE, expandrive /odrive renderings of your onedrive/cloud drive bucket and so on have been pretty bad in my experience.
- daniel_iversen 10y ago
  The Dropbox Client has a lot of smarts in it when it comes to fast and reliable downloads (threading, chunking etc.), so it might probably be a lot better than many other alternatives.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dkopi 10y ago
If any of the dropbox product managers are following - I would REALLY appreciate this in the individual paid version as well. Given a laptop with an SSD<1TB , I still want to be able to make use of the 1TB I'm paying for. Its currently possible by letting an entire folder upload to DB, and then unsyncing it. It stays on DB, but gets removed from the local drive. I would love to be able to see those unsynced folders locally, with the same cloud icon announced here.
- acdha 10y ago
  +1 – I use Dropbox for things like photos and music which are massive in total but where I rarely access more than a percentage or two on my laptop. It would be really useful to have my entire storage pool accessible without having to round-trip through the selective sync settings each time.
  - joshstrange 10y ago
    Yeah, I use camera sync to backup my phone's pictures but it's too much for my small SSD in my laptop. I have to periodically move files from "Camera Uploads" to "Camera Uploads Archive" (which is setup to not sync to my laptop) but to do that I have to be on a machine that can hold all of that (which luckily I have one but still it's a huge PITA. I've ALWAYS wanted dropbox to work the way outlined in Project Infinite and I'll be really disappointed if it doesn't come to personal as well. Seems like it would be pretty stupid not to as it's just a client change and it's not like it really costs them anymore AFAICT.
  - m_fayer 10y ago
    +2 - I feel like this is a (potentially intentional) blind spot for Dropbox and its ilk. I'm paying for 1 TB because I need that capacity, for my photo library, music, etc. - and I want to pay dropbox to make this work well with small fast SSDs. While there's various tricks you can employ to get this working, they're all a pain in one way or another. "A user who wants to back up and sync lots of media, and selectively offload it onto cloud storage to save local disk space" is probably not such a rare animal. And if I'm not feeling charitable, I would guess that this isn't explicitly supported because if it was, many more Dropbox users would start eating a lot more of their quota than they currently do.
akhilcacharya 10y ago
I was expecting skmething like this - Houston alluded to it in his recent Bloomberg interview.
megapatch 10y ago
What happens if the corporate virus scanner kicks in and reads all listed files? Also, can I un-download files I just checked once and don't need to have synchronized any more? Theroretically this is nice, practically it will render som unpleasant surprises.
- akavi 10y ago
  > practically it will render som unpleasant surprises. You take for granted that Dropbox hasn't considered these issues. Why?
- burkemw3 10y ago
  Indeed! I was looking at using Tahoe-LAFS in a similar manner as this dropbox feature, and happened upon a lot of information about those unpleasant surprises: Starting from https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/FAQ#Q23_FUSE https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/FAQ#Q23_FUSE with links to https://plus.sandbox.google.com/108313527900507320366/posts/ZrgdgLhV3NG https://plus.sandbox.google.com/108313527900507320366/posts/... and http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-November/003162.html http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/... on the subject.
- derefr 10y ago
  One good optimization would be caching the first ~512 bytes of each file—enough to make libmagic-based programs (which includes a lot of search-indexing systems, grep's binary-file-skipping, etc.) happy. With this in place, "opaque" files that an indexer doesn't want to look into could be left in the cloud, while only the files that actually need to be content-indexed would be downloaded.
nashashmi 10y ago
The first company to sort of mimic this was bitcasa. they just announced they are shutting their doors to consumer storage, because they were having greater success on the enterprise front. I wonder if this is related somehow.
dorfsmay 10y ago
Will the files disappear once you're disconnected? Or will the ones you were working with still accessible and sunc'ed like the other Dropbox files?
hiven 10y ago
Dropbox have a history of creating and then pulling the plug on ideas like this after a few years.
equalsnil 10y ago
I originally thought this is how Dropbox functioned years ago. Learning that you had to actually have every file on your hard disk if you wanted it in the cloud really put me off from using Dropbox for any significant amount of data. As so many have stated before me, they better release this for everyone. It isn't a revolutionary feature, it's pretty basic, even if the behind the scenes technicals are complicated.
radarsat1 10y ago
What I want from a network-based file system is some level of control over the caching. What I've found with FUSE-based file systems (on Linux) is that often they lock up my terminal. All it takes is a "cd" or an "ls" and suddenly I can't type anything until the network responds, which is not always instantaneous -- can't even Ctrl-C, because the program is blocked in the driver. I want to be able to tell when a command is going to block, or respond immediately with an error so that I can re-issue the command in a deferred manner. Having the command line lock-up because of filesystem latency is a bad user experience.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  Elsewhere in the thread it's mentioned that it won't lock up directory traversal. Of course when catting a file it would, it'd be hard to get around that...
antoncohen 10y ago
This feature is implemented at a low level, and works on the command line. For example if you have a directory that is all stored in the cloud you can `cd` to it without any network delay, you can do `ls -lh` and see a list with real sizes without a delay (e.g., see that an ISO is 650 MB), and you can do `du -sh` and see that all the files are taking up zero space. If you open a file in that directory, it will open, even from command line, then do `du -sh` and see that that file is now taking up space, while all the others in the directory are not. You can right-click to pin files and directories to be stored locally, and right-click to send them back to the cloud so they don't take up space. This is actually very different than traditional network file systems like SMB, NFS, WebDAV, and SSHFS. With a normal network file system over the WAN you would have major latency problems trying to `cd` and `ls` the remote file system. Most of them also don't have any ability to cache files locally when offline, or the ability to manually select which files are stored locally and which are remote. AFS does have some similar capabilities.
- kame3d 10y ago
  This is similar to the idea behind git-annex.
  - DanielDent 10y ago
    git-annex also has the advantage of letting you keep data in multiple destinations (including in cold storage), which I think is becoming increasingly important.
- KindDragon 10y ago
  So, if I try search inside Dropbox or Documents folder it will download all files from Dropbox to my computer ?
  - mnsc 10y ago
    Valid question. I wouldn't be happy if I ctrl-f on "My Documents", do a search and a 1 TB download starts up invisibly in the background filling my hard drive.
th0br0 10y ago
So this is similar to Cern VMFS presented a few days ago here with the FS being mutable? Neat!
nanoanderson 10y ago
Sounds like a similar goal to https://upthere.com https://upthere.com. If Dropbox can make this real, and with the reliability I've experienced on Dropbox over the past few years, I'm sold.
- akzel 10y ago
  That's what I thought! Upthere is a newcomer with no business model that I know of, so I think they'll have a hard time beating Dropbox…
pritambaral 10y ago
This was really exciting to read. The ability to seamlessly integrate with the OS. We already do it with SSHFS and NFS; but bringing Dropbox's sync, versioning, and offline caching would be great. Then I saw that it's not available on Linux. Which is really surprising, since supporting arbitrary filesystems is IMO dead-easy on Linux, and the easiest of the three desktop OSes. And since our company uses only Linux workstations (except for the designers), this is immediately unavailable to us. This is disheartening.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  Dropbox can't seriously write a "Universal Compatability" headline and not include Linux support. Disappointing.
  - eatonphil 10y ago
    I thought it was pretty hilarious. I wonder if I need to refine my definition of "universal".
  - tzakrajs 10y ago
    It is a shame that it went unwritten for an operating system where writing this functionality should be significantly easier (via FUSE or similar user-space file system) than Windows/MacOS.
    - eliaspro 10y ago
      While letting handle the Kernel-builtin bcache all the dirty/difficult caching.
  - fapjacks 10y ago
    Dropbox has some pretty creative marketing people making some interesting claims about their service, for sure.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Yea I was waiting to see if they were going to talk about Linux in the video. They didn't. This is low level enough that it'd have to be implemented as a FUSE layer, which could add quite a bit of complexity. I wonder how they're going to deal with Linux. Will it still just sync everything?
codezero 10y ago
This is a cool technological advancement but for me "in context" is not in a directory structure, it's in a conversation, my team has mostly replaced Dropbox with Slack with the exception of long form documentation.
amelius 10y ago
Nice. But shouldn't we be having open standards for such a basic part of our infrastructures?
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  No, because everyone knows you can't build a profitable startup around open standards that just work for everyone without being tied to your network as an identifiable user. Yes, because everyone knows it would be amazing to have this kind of functionality just work for everyone, regardless of their personal OS and technology/device choices.
- pritambaral 10y ago
  Yes, I'd like to see OwnCloud develop something like this. At least that way, I'd be able to use it on my system; even if OwnCloud themselves don't build it for Linux, I'd be able to make my own on contribute it, unlike with Dropbox.
  - guruz 10y ago
    https://github.com/owncloud/client/issues/4341 https://github.com/owncloud/client/issues/4341
- burkemw3 10y ago
  I also want this feature, and I like open stuff, so I wrote SyncthingFUSE[0]! It's primitive right now, but works for me at the moment. Bazil[1] has similar goals, but wasn't ready enough for me. I do very much like sibling /u/pritambaral's suggestion of OwnCloud support. I tried OwnCloud briefly in the past, but ended up switching away. A feature like this might get me to try it again and stay. [0]: https://github.com/burkemw3/syncthingfuse https://github.com/burkemw3/syncthingfuse [1]: https://bazil.org/ https://bazil.org/
  - thechriswalker 10y ago
    I have been watching the bazil project for a while - it's exactly the system I want. Still very alpha right now, so I don't (and one shouldn't) trust it with irreplaceable data.
abjorn 10y ago
So it's a networked file system, just implemented better? That was my takeaway from the post.
- rkangel 10y ago
  That was my read too. But Dropbox itself is just 'rsync, but with a better user experience'. In that case the significant improvement of user experience made for a whole new way of operating. The same could be true with this.
- robzyb 10y ago
  "Just implemented better"? "Just"? If it were as simple as you imply it is then surely we'd see this change made trivially to SMB, NFS, WebDAV, or SSHFS. I agree with you that in hindsight this is an obvious feature, but they actually decided to implement it, and I bet it wasn't entirely trivial.
  - bb85 10y ago
    I think the problem with making this change to more generic networked protocols is several aspects become a lot trickier then you can't impose limitations on the filesystem. The biggest problem, as usual, is invalidating the local cache. For Dropbox, who own and implement the authority on the shared drive state, it is a _very_ (relatively speaking) simple problem. Other protocols like SSHFS have to deal with filesystems of all kinds. Many of those do not support anything like inotify, and polling over huge directories would be horrible experience or performance wise (long delay or slowing down the whole host machine).
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    > I agree with you that in hindsight this is an obvious feature In hindsight? It's about time! I've been waiting for this for years...
  - pjc50 10y ago
    It's a long time coming to end-user products, and it's extremely hard to give it the right semantics for all use-cases. I first had a good look at caching distributed filesystems (and tried to build one) in my undergraduate thesis in 1999.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Where on the Cisco-to-Tarsnap spectrum is Dropbox in terms of trustworthiness with sensitive data?
jasonkester 10y ago
The only feature I want in addition to what Dropbox already gives me is a little box I can check that says "Never Delete Anything." That's it. Just never give me the option of permanently erasing an entire folder of photos from every machine I've ever owned just because I mess up your wacky Selective Sync workflow. I understand that there exist people who actually want all their machines to sync destructive changes, but I've never met one of them. More often, I see people lamenting that they deleted something important a year ago, thinking it was still backed up, but now it's gone. So yeah, you're not a backup service, you're just sync. I get that. But please please be a little less syncy and a little more backupy and you'll fit the worldview of a lot more people. It sounds like this is a step towards this (and four thousand steps past it), so at least we're getting close.
- gkoberger 10y ago
  I've mistakenly deleted files before, and Dropbox did two things: email me that a large number of files were deleted, and linked to my history page where I could restore them. It was a great experience, and seems like a solution to your problem.
- CPLX 10y ago
  Dropbox has had the "packrat" feature for a long time that keeps deleted and previous versions of files. I've been lucky enough not to have to use it much but the few times I have it's performed as expected and been invaluable.
pj_mukh 10y ago
Currently, to collaborate on Office-type files, we collaborate on Google drive/docs and then move it to Dropbox. This seems so silly. Is there a better, more integrated solution? Wish Dropbox had better Office integration. Currently, it just keeps making copies of a file if two people edit it.
- drglitch 10y ago
  Unless you're explicitly trying to stay away from anything microsoft, onedrive/office online sounds like a perfect solution for you. Been using it for quite some time for similar workstream and love it.
  - pj_mukh 10y ago
    No, I don't have any MS hatred, except we have GIANT media files, engineering logs, technical logs, in the same place as well. OneDrive AFAIK, isn't that great at selective syncing (and now Project Infinite!). Generally, cloud storage is done best by Dropbox. I'd love to be shown to be wrong.
- victorhooi 10y ago
  Curious - you mention you use Google Drive for collaboration - but then move it to Dropbox. Is there any particular reason you move it to Dropbox afterwards? (Or put another way, is there anything with Google Drive that you feel is missing, in your use case?)
tbrock 10y ago
Somewhat related: how reliable are SSHfs and other fuse filesystems on macs and on Linux these days? - On the Mac I'm worried about using fuse in general. Stability, reliability, Mac OS X being a hostile environment as its not "blessed" by Apple. - On Linux I'm more worried about the general nature of SSH as the basis for a filesystem. Which also applies to the running it on a Mac. The reason I ask is because theoretically you could spin up a t2 micro with a 1tb EBS volume and forget the whole Dropbox thing, mount it wherever you please, whatever. Obviously there are drawbacks, it's not local (fast), it doesn't have all the collaboration features of Dropbox, etc. but for relatively cold storage (colder than I need on a local ssd) that I want to access somewhat frequently, SSHfs seems like it could be fine. I'm not sure how easy it would be to corrupt, etc and I'm not sure about the two things I mention above. Hoping someone here knows.
- devit 10y ago
  You can just redirect a port with SSH and then use Samba/CIFS or NFS if you are worried about sshfs.
  - tbrock 10y ago
    I'm more worried about a shitty samba/cifs implementation! That is about the only worse thing I could think of.
- tomkinstinch 10y ago
  I sometimes use ExpanDrive on OSX, which is a nice GUI wrapper for what I believe to be something like fuse sshfs: http://www.expandrive.com/apps/expandrive/ http://www.expandrive.com/apps/expandrive/ It works well, though there can be noticeable latency sometimes, even when saving very small files. It can also mount S3, FTP, Dropbox, etc.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mark_l_watson 10y ago
That is a good idea. I use OneDrive because a terabyte is so inexpensive (and C. Rice is not on Microsoft's board of directors), but Dropbox is technologically impressive and I should give them another evaluation.
chris_wot 10y ago
Have they got a patent on this?
- trishume 10y ago
  They at least ought not to be granted one if they apply one since this exact thing has been done before by ODrive
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Well, they were granted one for peer-to-peer synchronisation... https://torrentfreak.com/dropbox-scores-patent-for-peer-to-peer-syncing-160103/ https://torrentfreak.com/dropbox-scores-patent-for-peer-to-p...
whatever_dude 10y ago
This is what Dropbox should have been. Glad they're moving towards that. (Now, if they can only implement a .dropboxignore feature...)
- tedmiston 10y ago
  For generated code or builds or something?
  - whatever_dude 10y ago
    For random stuff that should not be synced, much like .gitignore. That'll vary depending on the person, but for me it's usually for Mac/Windows crap (.DS_Store, Thumbs.db), temporary files of any kind, node_modules, and a few others.
Jgrubb 10y ago
My boss is already sold on this. Is there any time line for a release?
lucb1e 10y ago
A bit disappointing, it's about time they finally got around to it and yet "Check back here for more info as we continue to make progress." The remaining question is whether it'll be for pro users only as well...
d_intra_venous 10y ago
Wow this is familiar lol..... My hybrid cloud storage team here at Microsoft in Silicon Valley (which was a startup called StorSimple that Microsoft acquired) already built this feature for our hybrid cloud storage virtual appliance that released a few months ago and its already in production and being used by customers..... We called it Just in Time Item Level Restore but it's the exact same thing........and looks exactly the same in behavior as well.....and we have various optimization to make it efficient and deal with latency and stuff..... (Btw we have nothing to do with one drive or one drive for business. That'a completely separate team. We only build enterprise storage devices) Ugh this is why you want to be in the consumer space , not the enterprise space. If a consumer product and enterprise product make the exact same thing/product, most people remember/see the consumer product. The race conditions and clever data structures to represent the file blobs and file system structure in the cloud to do this efficiently is actually very cool......I'm not sure how they (Dropbox) implemented it but I wonder how similar it would be to how we did it. Oh well this is my last week here in Microsoft and I'm moving to Apple in a different space so I guess I don't really care about storage anymore lol. At least at Apple the cloud services and applications will be the backend for consumer used front end applications. People will think Dropbox was the first one to do this because it's in consumer space so it's more well known...... Well actually I can link all the public announcements and stuff that was dated long before this video on the feature. We should have made a public video like this. We have videos but they were all for internal demos.... Click the Preview link (skip to item level recovery section but the PM explanation doesn't do it justice so you won't see it as the same from a technical feature point of view but it's exactly the same and behaved the same zero storage on disk but the file system thinks it's there) To accomplish all our feature we actually have low level stuff as well but I can't go into the details since I'm not allowed to so I'll leave it at that. But Dropbox is a great company and I'm glad this feature is now available to Consumers not just enterprise. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-storsimple-virtual-array-preview/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-storsi... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-availability-of-the-storsimple-virtual-array/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-av...
- d_intra_venous 10y ago
alediaferia 10y ago
I remember the time when I implemented this and even more with a friend, all on our own: http://nemboapp.com http://nemboapp.com We've never had chance to push this though...
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Well unless it is abandoned - you're pushing it right now. And who is this targeting? For me as a "techie" the softpedia doesn't really instil any confidence and actually kind of makes it look cheap. Actually, I think for older software it is fine for some reason. But in this case it looks strange.
  - alediaferia 10y ago
    Honestly, Softpedia decided to write a review about it. We didn't even reach out to them. The project is currently unmaintained, and we may open-source part of it.
grandalf 10y ago
This is great news. If it's not part of the normal non-business Dropbox I think I'm going to stop using Dropbox. This should be a common-sense feature for the base product in 2016.
XorNot 10y ago
I'm curious who all these people are who have more bandwidth and download volume then they do local storage space.
- stronglikedan 10y ago
  My entire Prepress department does. Granted, we use DAM systems instead of cloud storage, but some are over the wire. Some assets can easily reach 10GB or more (each).
- tedmiston 10y ago
  It made me wonder if people are using their remote Dropbox space for archival or as a backup solution. The business plans appear to offer unlimited file recovery back to any point in time.
- bartvk 10y ago
  Probably all people who bought any MacBook with 128 gigs of SSD.
seanalltogether 10y ago
I'm glad to see they are finally addressing this problem. One of the largest requested features has been better management of selective sync folders [1] and many users have left for other solutions since they still haven't fixed it in the existing client. [1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201812255-Stop-auto-inheriting-new-folders-when-using-selective-sync https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201812...
canistr 10y ago
A couple of usability questions that don't appear to have been addressed in the video: - on a Mac, if I press the spacebar to show the quick preview and start navigating down the list, will this trigger downloading of all the files? - how are older files cached? Do we simply unselect devices to remove them locally? At least with Selective Sync, I can remove files eating up my hard drive (very important on devices with 128GB SSDs/HDs or less). It's much clearer in terms of what's on disk and how to manage it with Selective Sync. With Project Infinite, I'm wondering how one would remove files locally without fully deleting the file across the Dropbox folder for every other team member.
- azinman2 10y ago
  You don't delete files to save space locally. They automatically keep it cached for you, and delete from cache when it's over some limit.
sanbor 10y ago
The feature it's pretty convenient, but knowing that they don't provide proper encryption and that the US government and/or Dropbox employees can access to my data it's a no-go. Also I don't like to pay for Condoleezza Rice salary. http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ http://www.drop-dropbox.com/
- dimino 10y ago
  The US government can get into your home, do you refuse to live anywhere because of that?
  - shadowfox 10y ago
    > The US government can get into your home, do you refuse to live anywhere because of that? Not the OP. That feels like hyperbole: there are actual legal restrictions on "getting in to your home". When uploading data to a 3rd party the protections are much more limited.
    - dimino 10y ago
      Both require warrants. Are you referring to things like FISA courts and NSA wiretapping, or more mundane things like Dropbox volunteering your data? In the latter case, at least, it feels similar to your landlord letting the cops into your apartment.
      - sanbor 10y ago
        It is true that sometimes they require warrants. Also, Dropbox probably just wants access to my data to change my password in case I forget it. But technology can help me to avoid trusting them by encrypting everything in my end. Both the government and Dropbox employees are humans, and humans sometimes don't behave well. I'm willing to miss some features to get more privacy.
  - sanbor 10y ago
    I live in Argentina.
rajeevk 10y ago
What will happen if I run these commands: cd dropBoxDir grep -nr someStr .
kevinSuttle 10y ago
If you'd like a solution that the NSA doesn't have backdoors to: https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs
- kiwibulldog 10y ago
  The NSA doesn't have backdoors into Dropbox. Dropbox has had the highest rating from the EFF regarding user rights, transparency and privacy. https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-requests-2015#dropbox-report https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-reques...
  - nacs 10y ago
    That's pretty misleading. That article is judging what is written in the publicly stated privacy policy of each company. EFF has in no way verified the privacy policy is actually honored or that back-doors aren't installed in the companies' datacenters.
    - r3bl 10y ago
      And let us not forget about the whole Drop Dropbox scenario which was very popular on HN at the time it was released: http://www.drop-dropbox.com http://www.drop-dropbox.com And that Dropbox was one of the companies in the whole PRISM scandal. I still use it, mostly to transfer files between my devices, but there's no way I'm gonna be using it for anything sensitive. Everything sensitive goes to my organization's ownCloud installation which I completely trust since... well, I'm the one maintaining it.
  - kevinSuttle 10y ago
    Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, did all but admit it. http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/dropboxs-drew-houston-responds-to-snowdens-privacy-criticism-its-a-trade-off/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/dropboxs-drew-houston-respo...
- tjelen 10y ago
  Which is an alpha-version feature of a service that's currently in private beta. Looks great and I'd like to try it out, but currently I can't. (edit: missing word)
saintfiends 10y ago
I like how they silently ignored Linux, even though it says it's cross platform and available anywhere.
zopf 10y ago
Only 4 years behind Bitcasa...
grifter2000 10y ago
I'm not sure Dropbox is the porn host they used to be but this is still pretty cool stuff
nodesocket 10y ago
I was using BitCasa Drive but they just announced they are shutting it down. I need a cloud storage solution that stores files in the "cloud" but does not sync them locally. I have about 750GB of files and looking for a replacement for BitCasa Drive. Any recommendations?
- atishay811 10y ago
  S3 or AWS Glacier. Transmit is a good client.
elcct 10y ago
And the poor man's solution: https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat
partiallypro 10y ago
I'm just a lonely OneDrive user, looking out in envy at DropBox. Just doesn't make sense to have both, when I have Office 365 bundled.
songgao 10y ago
Glad to know Dropbox is supporting streaming (as opposed to sync'ing) model. It didn't make much sense to keep large files shared with me in Dropbox otherwise. Keybase Filesystem [0] has been also doing this from the beginning. >“Distributed” means you can access it from any device. > “Filesystem” means that there is no sync model -- files stream in and out on demand. Among other things, that means that files on KBFS don’t take up space on your devices. Plus the files are automatically signed, and end-to-end encrypted if in /keybase/private :D [0] https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs/understanding_kbfs https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs/understanding_kbfs
ElijahLynn 10y ago
They totally just implemented Bitcasa for Dropbox. I hope Google Drive follows suit, I have been asking them to buy Bitcasa for years now, since Bitcasa launched.
FullyFunctional 10y ago
Sounds like a great idea, but not exactly revolutionary. In the 80'es I saw at least one implementation of this which migrated between tapes(!), hard drives, and memory. I always wanted this. CODA [1] implemented parts of this as well. Unfortunately, Dropbox has unencrypted access to all files and is too expensive, otherwise I'd be all over this. I'd rather allocate funds towards an open source implementation (I think something interesting would be done based on idea from CODA and NFSv4). [1] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/
wrcwill 10y ago
Can someone tell me why this is harder to do on desktop computers? Because dropbox on phones (iOS atleast) has had exactly this forever, and it makes me wonder about the technical differences. - I see all the files, and can open any of them at will. - They don't take up space on my iphone unless cached - I can select files that i want to be available offline
- jeff_tyrrill 10y ago
  Dropbox uses phone APIs that were designed to do exactly this. There are not "cloud storage" APIs that simulate a file system in desktop OSes. So Dropbox had to implement the syncing logic. And they also, now, have to implement the cloud file system logic to get this new feature.
- pilif 10y ago
  The phone OSes don't allow arbitrary views to the file system. Every file you open from your Dropbox on mobile, you open through the Dropbox app which will then copy the downloaded file over to the opening application. Dropbox has full control over which files it downloads and which files it needs to keep around. On the desktop, the file manager and every single application (by virtue of their file open dialog) get access to any file at any time. You are supposed to be able to open any file in your Dropbox without going through a dedicated Dropbox app.
Zekio 10y ago
Isn't this pretty much the same as the old OneDrive? for windows 7?
adamkochanowicz 10y ago
Feels like this is aaaalmost there. I just didn't see an option to universally keep data storage below a certain amount. If I bring down so many local copies that I exceed the space on my computer, do I then have to peck through local files and individually revert them to being reference files until I get my space back? Would be great if, once a certain threshold is reached, the oldest downloaded files would revert seamlessly.
joeblau 10y ago
Everything old is new again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3UiKkQ3GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3UiKkQ3GE. This does look very interesting though; I feel like this is the storage solution that I've been looking for.
pritam2020 10y ago
Seems like a rip off of 'Dunder Mifflin Infinity'.
cloudg53 10y ago
looks like they ripped off www.odrive.com - even stole their logo!!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
xivzgrev 10y ago
Google drive has had this feature for a while. Your Google docs are essentially shortcuts to the cloud. Im glad Dropbox is releasing this, I think it's very useful, but man is it trumped up. They have officially crossed chasm into the mainstream, when there is more marketing hype than technological innovation in a new release.
- gcr 10y ago
  Google Drive only 'shortcutizes' actual Google docs, which can't be edited offline anyway. If you put a PDF or a large media file (or anything that takes up space anyway) into Google Drive, you don't get a placeholder, you get your entire video collection. I consider Dropbox's feature a huge improvement over that.
  - bartvk 10y ago
    Actually, some Google Docs can be edited offline. I once tried to figure out what is possible and what isn't. Basically, you can edit Docs and Slides offline in Chrome. Drawings and Sheets can only be viewed, not edited offline. This is 2013 information though, some things may have changed for the better.
siranachronist 10y ago
sigh once again Microsoft is ahead of the curve, but drops the ball and lets another company swoop in
joshschreuder 10y ago
So this is pretty cool, but my question is - does it solve a long term problem? It seems like storage is one thing that continues to expand in size very fast, and decrease in cost in kind. We'll soon have many TB SSDs for cheaper than traditional hard disk drives, so I'm not convinced this solves a real future consumer need. Maybe there are other uses beyond space saving that I'm missing.
microcolonel 10y ago
I'm not a Dropbox user, but I sorta assumed that this was already the case. I use sshfs when I'm fully connected, and I don't really know how people could get by being limited by their endpoint's storage up until now.
dilly_li 10y ago
I think the video could be better polished... I have this thought that all the big IT companies hire professional video editors nowadays.
denibertovic 10y ago
And they conveniently don't mention Linux support.... Sigh.. Also interesting thing to note is how everybody came down on keybase FS because the sync is on-demand. Most people citing dropbox and things like "if it was a viable option dropbox would do it and not have full sync". Well now... :D
Brajeshwar 10y ago
One should look at ExpanDrive. It does it for many Cloud Storage Services, including Dropbox. I like it and use it. http://www.expandrive.com/ http://www.expandrive.com/
Tanax 10y ago
Have anyone speculated how this is achieved, from a technical standpoint? How would one go about to start creating something like this on their own that works against e.g. a NAS?
brisance 10y ago
BitTorrent Sync has had a similar feature for a while now. http://help.getsync.com/hc/en-us/articles/204754669-What-is-a-BTS-file- http://help.getsync.com/hc/en-us/articles/204754669-What-is-...
lispython 10y ago
This remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike. [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html
tripzilch 10y ago
I missed the part where they said "we also implemented a strict 'No War Criminals' policy for our Board of Directors" and I could allow myself any amount of respect for this organisation again. Seriously I can't. This won't go away until she goes away. If I would, I would commit the sin "out of sight is out of mind". This, yes including the cynical remark I began my post with, is really the only way I can vote or voice my utter disapproval of such kinds of people. We shouldn't let that be forgotten and buried. I wish I could say, but this has nothing to do with Dropbox as a software/datastorage infrastructure company. It should have nothing to do with them, and still it does, she's just there as if she's not a despiccable human being responsible for the murder and torture of innocent people. What is such a person even doing in the board of directors of a company like Dropbox? It doesn't make any sense. But that doesn't mean we should, ever, just forget and shut up about it. It's not a tiny thing. It's not even a medium large thing. The only reason she's not currently being tried as an actual war criminal is because the USA refuses to acknowledge the ICC and therefore by logical conclusion, er force, can never be tried for war crimes. So yeah nice project, features, whatever. Too bad about the giant death shadow of Condoleezza Rice obscuring my ability to appreciate it.
- vocatus_gate 10y ago
  Take a breath there buddy

743 points by maguay 10y ago

owenwil 10y ago

All I can say is: Finally. What took so long?

pwenzel 10y ago

Any hints as to when this feature will be rolled out?

rethab 10y ago

Mac and Windows means 'universal compatibility'? :(

_kyran 10y ago
To be fair, that's a decent start. Especially if you're looking at prioritising where your customer base is. Linux is important, but nowhere near as much in comparison for the average consumer/business.
- noja 10y ago
  It is a very decent start, it's just not "universal".
- zymhan 10y ago
  Dropbox is disproportionately popular with Linux users though, given their great Linux clients.
  - philjohn 10y ago
    That's as may be, however, what % of their users are on Linux is the question they needed to answer when deciding on initial platform support. Linux is also a much larger target than Mac OS or Windows ... different filesystems, desktop environments etc. etc.
    - pmontra 10y ago
      "different filesystems": maybe not. This new Dropbox thing is a network filesystem so it could just use normal syscalls to read and write files on any filesystem the ~/Dropbox directory and be (local) filesystem agnostic. After all you can bypass the problem by running a Windows VM in VirtualBox with guest additions and a shared filesystem. Is another way to map the Windows Dropbox's network filesystem to the Linux one, whatever it is. Still, very cumbersome and probably slow. I remember not stellar performances with sharing files between host and guest OSes in that way. Hopefully Dropbox will release the API and somebody will write a user mode filesystem to interface this new service.
    - pritambaral 10y ago
      > different filesystems You're looking at the wrong end of it. Dropbox doesn't have to deal with any filesystem, Dropbox instead needs to build a filesystem. It doesn't have to deal with any filesystem because Linux abstracts it. The same abstraction allows it to build its own filesystem really, really easily. How easy? I wrote, mounted, and used a filesystem in less than fifteen minutes. In node.js. It's that easy. > desktop environments Dropbox doesn't need to support various desktop environments, just a stable API for the desktop environments (actually, just file managers) to use. Isn't this how Nautilus, Thunar, Dolphin et al. already support Dropbox's existing features?
  - michaelmior 10y ago
    That may be true compared to other synchronization solutions on Linux, but I doubt Linux users make up a disproportionate amount of their customer base.
    - zymhan 10y ago
      No, but it would be a marked shift in their attitude towards Linux if they just never brought cool new features to it. Not saying they're doing that here, I'm sure it'll take time to implement.
    - noja 10y ago
      Linux users evangelise Dropbox more than other users.
  - codezero 10y ago
    I expect their revenue isn't disproportionately from Linux users though.
NikhilVerma 10y ago
I think it's an unfortunate situation resulting from the need to be realistic about releases. If something can be released now for > 90% of the users then companies will prioritise doing that and then releasing the remaining 10% later. The problem is when that remaining 10% takes way longer than expected.
- pritambaral 10y ago
  Or never :( Looking at you Google Drive.
- teach 10y ago
  And even though I've been a happy Linux user for more than a decade, 10% is very generous. Especially since this is only part of their Business product for now.
batat 10y ago
Meh... https://github.com/joe42/CloudFusion https://github.com/joe42/CloudFusion

_kyran 10y ago

This is huge. The biggest reason for me to not store more content on dropbox, is that it always comes with the trade-off of taking up space on my local drive (128gb) as well. Sure there's selective sync, but that's an all-or nothing approach. I like the way Google approaches this with their Google Photos service. X most recent photos are stored locally, and everything else is pulled down on the fly as you search/browse for them.

bluesilver07 10y ago
>> X most recent photos are stored locally, and everything else is pulled down on the fly as you search/browse for them. Which app are you talking about? The desktop app is merely an uploader. It doesn't really sync photos.
- _kyran 10y ago
  The Android app
- y4mi 10y ago
  urm, its been in the desktop client for over a year now... it randomly indexed all my wallpapers and threw them all into my timeline... i'm still not finished with the resulting cleanup. though it might have been Google Picasa desktop app, i used both back then
tedmiston 10y ago
Apple does something similar in Photos on iOS.
- stephenr 10y ago
  On OS X too.
- samf 10y ago
  Not disagreeing, but I'm not seeing that on my wife's iphone. She got a 16 gig phone (big mistake), but we were thinking that getting everything on iCloud would make up for this. We pay every month for iCloud storage. That's not what we're seeing. Her phone gets to be 100% full, and deleting a photo frees up space. When we delete a photo, we get dire warnings that "this will delete the photo on all of your devices, and in the cloud too." I download them to my computer before doing this, so nothing is really lost. But it's annoying.

altharaz 10y ago

This is a very good news for our tiny laptops with just 128GB hard drive. Next step: migrate 100% of the OS in the Cloud?

doque 10y ago

I'm guessing this will only be available for Business subscriptions?

zimpenfish 10y ago
Certainly reads that way with all the talk of teams.
sensecall 10y ago
I was wondering the same thing. Been desperately wanting this feature for a long time – are there any other services offering it?

fnordsensei 10y ago

This has been one of the pros of using BT Sync for a while now. Good to see that more tools are getting it.

Spooky23 10y ago

This is pretty amazing... This could dramatically improve our ability to deliver VDI and other emerging user experiences. How do you get a hold of a high level salesperson at Dropbox?

djhworld 10y ago

Does the dropbox API support s3 like operations where you can download byte ranges etc?

seanieb 10y ago
Yes. They've supported it since V1 AFIK. https://www.dropbox.com/developers-v1/core/docs#files-GET https://www.dropbox.com/developers-v1/core/docs#files-GET

imaginenore 10y ago

So it's a mounted SSH drive with some local caching? Like SSHFS?

nowbacktowork 10y ago
More like WebDAV, but yeah. This is what jungle disk did when it was first released.
- seanieb 10y ago
  This isn't the case here.
  - nowbacktowork 10y ago
    So probably something similar to eldos cbfs/dokan backed by a filesystem cache db so the crud operations do not need to hit the backend?
seanieb 10y ago
AFIK this is not implemented using the usual SSHFS/FUSE approach. This is something new. Edit: More details here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11571640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11571640
- gkya 10y ago
  It is either a kernel-mode filesystem, or a user-mode. I dont think that this is possible with an other approach, but IDK that well win32 and mac.
detaro 10y ago
SSHFS has selectable local caching and automatic sync of those cached files?
hemancuso 10y ago
It's a filesystem filter driver

jorangreef 10y ago

How is this implemented on Windows vs OS X?

dkopi 10y ago
It can't. This is the type of features that have to be developed for each OS separately.
- jorangreef 10y ago
  Yes, that's what's I meant, how would you develop it on Windows vs OS X etc? What options are available on those platforms?
  - dkopi 10y ago
    I don't know how dropbox has actually implemented this, and I'm not sure about OSX, But on windows you might use a kernel file system filter driver or a shell namespace extension: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc144095(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc1... This looks like an open source project that provides something similar for google drive: https://github.com/google/google-drive-shell-extension https://github.com/google/google-drive-shell-extension On linux this could probably be even easier, just mounting a directory to a remote NFS server.
    - hemancuso 10y ago
      If you look in the Dropbox install the driver is already being distributed on Mac and Windows. It's a filter driver.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
gkya 10y ago
My first guess is decoupled drivers with an abstraction that the actual dropbox client service uses. One driver for windows, one for mac. Though I don't know if you can do user mode filesystems on those, but there is this: https://dokan-dev.github.io/ https://dokan-dev.github.io/ Or else they may have used some fs event notification library to intercept access to files, but I think that would be harder (impossible? IDK win32/mac) to do than a filesystem.

yoz-y 10y ago

The word 'revolutionary' definitely deprecated in the past years. Anyways, this is great news as I'll no longer have to default to the website search for selectively non-synced files.

dharma1 10y ago
Agreed re:selective sync. This seems so much obviously better solution, wonder why it wasn't there before
michaelmior 10y ago
Do you mean depreciated?
- yoz-y 10y ago
  I do indeed!

bobsoap 10y ago

This sounds like the exact feature I've been desperately looking for, for quite some time now, watching Microsoft discontinue online-only files in Onedrive because "it confused customers", and shaking my head at the blatant lack of this kind of thing everywhere... Until just recently, when I found odrive[1]. Not affiliated with them in any way, just a fan - if you don't want to wait until Dropbox decides to launch this publicly, check it out. It works with Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive/CreativeCloud/what-have-you and does exactly what Dropbox Infinite promises to do, except that it's seasoned, working, practically bug-free (that I can tell), and, well, available now. [1] https://www.odrive.com/ https://www.odrive.com/

degenerate 10y ago
$99/year ($8.25/mo) to have "Premium" which offers the option to leave files in the cloud and sync on demand. This is too much money to gain a feature addition. No thanks.
- bobsoap 10y ago
  Interesting... I just checked and apparently I'm on a grandfathered free plan that can still unsync. Didn't know they changed it. For me, it's still more than just a feature addition though - I use odrive for all my cloud storage accounts. It's all under one roof. Your mileage may vary, of course.
- pmontra 10y ago
  Yeah, only if customers pay that for me and as long as they pay. I don't have that many files on my own.
JBiserkov 10y ago
Microsoft had what they called "placeholders" and it worked great, but it did confuse some users who looked for a file, saw it was "there" and happily went offline. Only to find it was only a placeholder. Furthermore, on devices with limited storage (phones, tablets) even the small size of the placeholders becomes a problem when the number of files is big enough. So Microsoft temporarily removed the placeholders functionality, promising to bring it back in the near future using some new (at the time not yet invented?) technique that would solve the problem.

fulafel 10y ago

The cloud "wheel of reinvention" revolves to bring AFS to the masses? Or is this just showing the files using a file manager plugin, not visible as a real filesystem? edit: working at the FS level according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11571640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11571640 - good job Dropbox! Anyone know if it's also supported on Linux?

sashk 10y ago

Finally. But for me it's too late.

andr 10y ago

I really hope this is available to personal accounts, and not only business, as the blog post sort of implies. With the average laptop being 256GB and the Dropbox paid account being 1TB, that's badly needed.

carlmcqueen 10y ago
I was thinking this as well. I have been really frustrated with selective sync because of how long the process takes to check the folders that make sense on each computer.

JorgeGT 10y ago

This sounds awesome, but with all the talk about drag files, double click, etc., I wonder if this will work from the command line?

michaelmior 10y ago
I don't see why not. I assume they're managing all of this at the file system level.

gkya 10y ago

Oh my marketing, isn't this basically NFS?

arethuza 10y ago
A reasonable question - it was my initial reaction. However, from what I recall of how NFS worked it didn't sync anything locally - if it was remote it stayed remote. This seems to be an interesting hybrid.
dagw 10y ago
NFS with selective offline caching and automatic re-syncing upon reconnetion. NFS never really did that. AFS and Coda kind of tried, I don't recall it working that well. Plus all the other basic Dropbox features
pjc50 10y ago
No. NFS requires a continuously online connection and pulls the metadata over it, so you have to wait for `ls` and `stat`. Caching in NFS is quite limited, and of course its authentication and network-traversal problems are hard work to deal with.

dkyc 10y ago

At first I thought "Well, Dropbox storage is 5x as expensive as hard drive space, so what's the point?". What I didn't see was the team use case: It's actually brilliant to have access to every document of all of my colleagues at all times, without saving all that stuff locally, or taking forever sync. This is really amazing. The problem with our current shared team folders is that you need to make a deliberate effort to share something with the team. That means when you want to pull information from the shared space, you're very likely to get an outdated copy. Thanks to 1.) no storage constraints and 2.) deep OS-integration, all files can actually be always up-to-date with Dropbox Infinite. That really sounds cool.

padiyar83 10y ago
> ..or taking forever sync. This is really amazing. I don't think this solves the problem of taking forever to sync. Nothing has changed there. You are still bound by the same data retrieval and network latencies to get the file stored in a datacenter somewhere to you. That one is a harder problem to crack because it needs a lot of infra investment in expanding your content delivery footprint and replace SSD's with something much faster, like flash.
- Mtinie 10y ago
  This solves an important aspect of the sync problem -- the ability to selectively sync individual files without having to sync the whole directory that it is part of (or even to have to know what the directory is in advance).
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    Dropbox has actually had Selective Sync for years. The whole part about the metadata being cached locally and a seamless experience at file system level is new though. https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/4456 https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/4456
    - Mtinie 10y ago

kyriakos 10y ago

Microsoft had this feature built in windows 8 / 8.1 and removed it in Windows 10 cause it "confused" customers. Hope this will nudge them to bring it back.

pjc50 10y ago
It's removed in 10? That's kind of a disaster, as it's critical to making the Surface and various tablets usable.
- kyriakos 10y ago
  It removed "placeholders" and added a selective Sync feature but its not the same. Placeholders experience felt more intuitive. Files that were only available online were marked so you know. I guess the problem started cause a lot of users would not be able to access files when offline and started complaining to their support service. Too bad though I loved that feature.
pca 10y ago
I think they'll bring it back in the summer, but didn't find a more recent source than this: https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/microsoft-consumer-services/onedrive/63140/onedrive-placeholders-to-return-with-redstone https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/microsoft-consumer-services/o...

brodo 10y ago

Dropbox is pretty overpriced compared to OneCloud. If they don't solve that I'm not going to switch back.

danieldk 10y ago
I disagree. While it is true that it is more expensive per GB, Dropbox has a lot of features that make it more fit for heavy lifting, such as: * Chunked uploads. Try to modify a 1GB file in OneDrive. The complete file will be resynchronized. Dropbox just uploads the chunks that have changed. * LAN sync. If you are sharing files with family/colleagues that are on the same network, Dropbox shares file chunks peer to peer. This usually results in much faster synchronisation than downloading from the cloud. * Dropbox has file requests. People can upload files to your Dropbox, but what others upload is not visible. * In my experience, the Dropbox client is a lot more stable than the OneDrive client on OS X. OneDrive crashes or sometimes cannot sync certain files. To me the speediness, file requests, and more reliability is well worth whatever the price delta is. (Note: I have both, but I only use OneDrive as an endpoint for Arq backups.)

aroman 10y ago

To those of you who are dismissing this because AFS/NFS has had this for years, the point is that this is running over the Internet, not your local network.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fulafel 10y ago
AFS worked pretty well over the internet, WAN was an important use case. But it was just an early one (1988!), many others followed. Coda, SFS, recently BackFS for FUSE, Sun's CacheFS and Red Hat's FS-Cache for NFS etc etc.

gumby 10y ago

If they can make a remote Spotlight index of the cloud content for Mac users then it really would be seamless. Hope they do it.

Angostura 10y ago
Lets see how it copes with a nice big Photos.app library
kccqzy 10y ago
Not likely because you can use your own spotlight importers.

CamatHN 10y ago

My original thought was, so its a network drive huh? But when you think about the fact that everyone has 128GB Surfaces they take everywhere remotely this is really powerful and I can image a lot easier to administer. Love how they have integrated and just added a simple icon. Well done Dropbox

fapjacks 10y ago
"the fact that everyone has 128GB Surfaces" This seems vaguely astroturfy.

mahyarm 10y ago

I will curious about the performance. SSHFS/FUSE, expandrive /odrive renderings of your onedrive/cloud drive bucket and so on have been pretty bad in my experience.

daniel_iversen 10y ago
The Dropbox Client has a lot of smarts in it when it comes to fast and reliable downloads (threading, chunking etc.), so it might probably be a lot better than many other alternatives.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dkopi 10y ago

If any of the dropbox product managers are following - I would REALLY appreciate this in the individual paid version as well. Given a laptop with an SSD<1TB , I still want to be able to make use of the 1TB I'm paying for. Its currently possible by letting an entire folder upload to DB, and then unsyncing it. It stays on DB, but gets removed from the local drive. I would love to be able to see those unsynced folders locally, with the same cloud icon announced here.

acdha 10y ago
+1 – I use Dropbox for things like photos and music which are massive in total but where I rarely access more than a percentage or two on my laptop. It would be really useful to have my entire storage pool accessible without having to round-trip through the selective sync settings each time.
- joshstrange 10y ago
  Yeah, I use camera sync to backup my phone's pictures but it's too much for my small SSD in my laptop. I have to periodically move files from "Camera Uploads" to "Camera Uploads Archive" (which is setup to not sync to my laptop) but to do that I have to be on a machine that can hold all of that (which luckily I have one but still it's a huge PITA. I've ALWAYS wanted dropbox to work the way outlined in Project Infinite and I'll be really disappointed if it doesn't come to personal as well. Seems like it would be pretty stupid not to as it's just a client change and it's not like it really costs them anymore AFAICT.
- m_fayer 10y ago
  +2 - I feel like this is a (potentially intentional) blind spot for Dropbox and its ilk. I'm paying for 1 TB because I need that capacity, for my photo library, music, etc. - and I want to pay dropbox to make this work well with small fast SSDs. While there's various tricks you can employ to get this working, they're all a pain in one way or another. "A user who wants to back up and sync lots of media, and selectively offload it onto cloud storage to save local disk space" is probably not such a rare animal. And if I'm not feeling charitable, I would guess that this isn't explicitly supported because if it was, many more Dropbox users would start eating a lot more of their quota than they currently do.

akhilcacharya 10y ago

I was expecting skmething like this - Houston alluded to it in his recent Bloomberg interview.

megapatch 10y ago

What happens if the corporate virus scanner kicks in and reads all listed files? Also, can I un-download files I just checked once and don't need to have synchronized any more? Theroretically this is nice, practically it will render som unpleasant surprises.

akavi 10y ago
> practically it will render som unpleasant surprises. You take for granted that Dropbox hasn't considered these issues. Why?
burkemw3 10y ago
Indeed! I was looking at using Tahoe-LAFS in a similar manner as this dropbox feature, and happened upon a lot of information about those unpleasant surprises: Starting from https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/FAQ#Q23_FUSE https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/FAQ#Q23_FUSE with links to https://plus.sandbox.google.com/108313527900507320366/posts/ZrgdgLhV3NG https://plus.sandbox.google.com/108313527900507320366/posts/... and http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-November/003162.html http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/... on the subject.
derefr 10y ago
One good optimization would be caching the first ~512 bytes of each file—enough to make libmagic-based programs (which includes a lot of search-indexing systems, grep's binary-file-skipping, etc.) happy. With this in place, "opaque" files that an indexer doesn't want to look into could be left in the cloud, while only the files that actually need to be content-indexed would be downloaded.

nashashmi 10y ago

The first company to sort of mimic this was bitcasa. they just announced they are shutting their doors to consumer storage, because they were having greater success on the enterprise front. I wonder if this is related somehow.

dorfsmay 10y ago

Will the files disappear once you're disconnected? Or will the ones you were working with still accessible and sunc'ed like the other Dropbox files?

hiven 10y ago

Dropbox have a history of creating and then pulling the plug on ideas like this after a few years.

equalsnil 10y ago

I originally thought this is how Dropbox functioned years ago. Learning that you had to actually have every file on your hard disk if you wanted it in the cloud really put me off from using Dropbox for any significant amount of data. As so many have stated before me, they better release this for everyone. It isn't a revolutionary feature, it's pretty basic, even if the behind the scenes technicals are complicated.

radarsat1 10y ago

What I want from a network-based file system is some level of control over the caching. What I've found with FUSE-based file systems (on Linux) is that often they lock up my terminal. All it takes is a "cd" or an "ls" and suddenly I can't type anything until the network responds, which is not always instantaneous -- can't even Ctrl-C, because the program is blocked in the driver. I want to be able to tell when a command is going to block, or respond immediately with an error so that I can re-issue the command in a deferred manner. Having the command line lock-up because of filesystem latency is a bad user experience.

lucb1e 10y ago
Elsewhere in the thread it's mentioned that it won't lock up directory traversal. Of course when catting a file it would, it'd be hard to get around that...

antoncohen 10y ago

This feature is implemented at a low level, and works on the command line. For example if you have a directory that is all stored in the cloud you can `cd` to it without any network delay, you can do `ls -lh` and see a list with real sizes without a delay (e.g., see that an ISO is 650 MB), and you can do `du -sh` and see that all the files are taking up zero space. If you open a file in that directory, it will open, even from command line, then do `du -sh` and see that that file is now taking up space, while all the others in the directory are not. You can right-click to pin files and directories to be stored locally, and right-click to send them back to the cloud so they don't take up space. This is actually very different than traditional network file systems like SMB, NFS, WebDAV, and SSHFS. With a normal network file system over the WAN you would have major latency problems trying to `cd` and `ls` the remote file system. Most of them also don't have any ability to cache files locally when offline, or the ability to manually select which files are stored locally and which are remote. AFS does have some similar capabilities.

kame3d 10y ago
This is similar to the idea behind git-annex.
- DanielDent 10y ago
  git-annex also has the advantage of letting you keep data in multiple destinations (including in cold storage), which I think is becoming increasingly important.
KindDragon 10y ago
So, if I try search inside Dropbox or Documents folder it will download all files from Dropbox to my computer ?
- mnsc 10y ago
  Valid question. I wouldn't be happy if I ctrl-f on "My Documents", do a search and a 1 TB download starts up invisibly in the background filling my hard drive.

th0br0 10y ago

So this is similar to Cern VMFS presented a few days ago here with the FS being mutable? Neat!

nanoanderson 10y ago

Sounds like a similar goal to https://upthere.com https://upthere.com. If Dropbox can make this real, and with the reliability I've experienced on Dropbox over the past few years, I'm sold.

akzel 10y ago
That's what I thought! Upthere is a newcomer with no business model that I know of, so I think they'll have a hard time beating Dropbox…

pritambaral 10y ago

This was really exciting to read. The ability to seamlessly integrate with the OS. We already do it with SSHFS and NFS; but bringing Dropbox's sync, versioning, and offline caching would be great. Then I saw that it's not available on Linux. Which is really surprising, since supporting arbitrary filesystems is IMO dead-easy on Linux, and the easiest of the three desktop OSes. And since our company uses only Linux workstations (except for the designers), this is immediately unavailable to us. This is disheartening.

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
Dropbox can't seriously write a "Universal Compatability" headline and not include Linux support. Disappointing.
- eatonphil 10y ago
  I thought it was pretty hilarious. I wonder if I need to refine my definition of "universal".
- tzakrajs 10y ago
  It is a shame that it went unwritten for an operating system where writing this functionality should be significantly easier (via FUSE or similar user-space file system) than Windows/MacOS.
  - eliaspro 10y ago
    While letting handle the Kernel-builtin bcache all the dirty/difficult caching.
- fapjacks 10y ago
  Dropbox has some pretty creative marketing people making some interesting claims about their service, for sure.
djsumdog 10y ago
Yea I was waiting to see if they were going to talk about Linux in the video. They didn't. This is low level enough that it'd have to be implemented as a FUSE layer, which could add quite a bit of complexity. I wonder how they're going to deal with Linux. Will it still just sync everything?

codezero 10y ago

This is a cool technological advancement but for me "in context" is not in a directory structure, it's in a conversation, my team has mostly replaced Dropbox with Slack with the exception of long form documentation.

amelius 10y ago

Nice. But shouldn't we be having open standards for such a basic part of our infrastructures?

bobwaycott 10y ago
No, because everyone knows you can't build a profitable startup around open standards that just work for everyone without being tied to your network as an identifiable user. Yes, because everyone knows it would be amazing to have this kind of functionality just work for everyone, regardless of their personal OS and technology/device choices.
pritambaral 10y ago
Yes, I'd like to see OwnCloud develop something like this. At least that way, I'd be able to use it on my system; even if OwnCloud themselves don't build it for Linux, I'd be able to make my own on contribute it, unlike with Dropbox.
- guruz 10y ago
  https://github.com/owncloud/client/issues/4341 https://github.com/owncloud/client/issues/4341
burkemw3 10y ago
I also want this feature, and I like open stuff, so I wrote SyncthingFUSE[0]! It's primitive right now, but works for me at the moment. Bazil[1] has similar goals, but wasn't ready enough for me. I do very much like sibling /u/pritambaral's suggestion of OwnCloud support. I tried OwnCloud briefly in the past, but ended up switching away. A feature like this might get me to try it again and stay. [0]: https://github.com/burkemw3/syncthingfuse https://github.com/burkemw3/syncthingfuse [1]: https://bazil.org/ https://bazil.org/
- thechriswalker 10y ago
  I have been watching the bazil project for a while - it's exactly the system I want. Still very alpha right now, so I don't (and one shouldn't) trust it with irreplaceable data.

abjorn 10y ago

So it's a networked file system, just implemented better? That was my takeaway from the post.

rkangel 10y ago
That was my read too. But Dropbox itself is just 'rsync, but with a better user experience'. In that case the significant improvement of user experience made for a whole new way of operating. The same could be true with this.
robzyb 10y ago
"Just implemented better"? "Just"? If it were as simple as you imply it is then surely we'd see this change made trivially to SMB, NFS, WebDAV, or SSHFS. I agree with you that in hindsight this is an obvious feature, but they actually decided to implement it, and I bet it wasn't entirely trivial.
- bb85 10y ago
  I think the problem with making this change to more generic networked protocols is several aspects become a lot trickier then you can't impose limitations on the filesystem. The biggest problem, as usual, is invalidating the local cache. For Dropbox, who own and implement the authority on the shared drive state, it is a _very_ (relatively speaking) simple problem. Other protocols like SSHFS have to deal with filesystems of all kinds. Many of those do not support anything like inotify, and polling over huge directories would be horrible experience or performance wise (long delay or slowing down the whole host machine).
- lucb1e 10y ago
  > I agree with you that in hindsight this is an obvious feature In hindsight? It's about time! I've been waiting for this for years...
- pjc50 10y ago
  It's a long time coming to end-user products, and it's extremely hard to give it the right semantics for all use-cases. I first had a good look at caching distributed filesystems (and tried to build one) in my undergraduate thesis in 1999.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

Where on the Cisco-to-Tarsnap spectrum is Dropbox in terms of trustworthiness with sensitive data?

jasonkester 10y ago

The only feature I want in addition to what Dropbox already gives me is a little box I can check that says "Never Delete Anything." That's it. Just never give me the option of permanently erasing an entire folder of photos from every machine I've ever owned just because I mess up your wacky Selective Sync workflow. I understand that there exist people who actually want all their machines to sync destructive changes, but I've never met one of them. More often, I see people lamenting that they deleted something important a year ago, thinking it was still backed up, but now it's gone. So yeah, you're not a backup service, you're just sync. I get that. But please please be a little less syncy and a little more backupy and you'll fit the worldview of a lot more people. It sounds like this is a step towards this (and four thousand steps past it), so at least we're getting close.

gkoberger 10y ago
I've mistakenly deleted files before, and Dropbox did two things: email me that a large number of files were deleted, and linked to my history page where I could restore them. It was a great experience, and seems like a solution to your problem.
CPLX 10y ago
Dropbox has had the "packrat" feature for a long time that keeps deleted and previous versions of files. I've been lucky enough not to have to use it much but the few times I have it's performed as expected and been invaluable.

pj_mukh 10y ago

Currently, to collaborate on Office-type files, we collaborate on Google drive/docs and then move it to Dropbox. This seems so silly. Is there a better, more integrated solution? Wish Dropbox had better Office integration. Currently, it just keeps making copies of a file if two people edit it.

drglitch 10y ago
Unless you're explicitly trying to stay away from anything microsoft, onedrive/office online sounds like a perfect solution for you. Been using it for quite some time for similar workstream and love it.
- pj_mukh 10y ago
  No, I don't have any MS hatred, except we have GIANT media files, engineering logs, technical logs, in the same place as well. OneDrive AFAIK, isn't that great at selective syncing (and now Project Infinite!). Generally, cloud storage is done best by Dropbox. I'd love to be shown to be wrong.
victorhooi 10y ago
Curious - you mention you use Google Drive for collaboration - but then move it to Dropbox. Is there any particular reason you move it to Dropbox afterwards? (Or put another way, is there anything with Google Drive that you feel is missing, in your use case?)

tbrock 10y ago

Somewhat related: how reliable are SSHfs and other fuse filesystems on macs and on Linux these days? - On the Mac I'm worried about using fuse in general. Stability, reliability, Mac OS X being a hostile environment as its not "blessed" by Apple. - On Linux I'm more worried about the general nature of SSH as the basis for a filesystem. Which also applies to the running it on a Mac. The reason I ask is because theoretically you could spin up a t2 micro with a 1tb EBS volume and forget the whole Dropbox thing, mount it wherever you please, whatever. Obviously there are drawbacks, it's not local (fast), it doesn't have all the collaboration features of Dropbox, etc. but for relatively cold storage (colder than I need on a local ssd) that I want to access somewhat frequently, SSHfs seems like it could be fine. I'm not sure how easy it would be to corrupt, etc and I'm not sure about the two things I mention above. Hoping someone here knows.

devit 10y ago
You can just redirect a port with SSH and then use Samba/CIFS or NFS if you are worried about sshfs.
- tbrock 10y ago
  I'm more worried about a shitty samba/cifs implementation! That is about the only worse thing I could think of.
tomkinstinch 10y ago
I sometimes use ExpanDrive on OSX, which is a nice GUI wrapper for what I believe to be something like fuse sshfs: http://www.expandrive.com/apps/expandrive/ http://www.expandrive.com/apps/expandrive/ It works well, though there can be noticeable latency sometimes, even when saving very small files. It can also mount S3, FTP, Dropbox, etc.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mark_l_watson 10y ago

That is a good idea. I use OneDrive because a terabyte is so inexpensive (and C. Rice is not on Microsoft's board of directors), but Dropbox is technologically impressive and I should give them another evaluation.

chris_wot 10y ago

Have they got a patent on this?

trishume 10y ago
They at least ought not to be granted one if they apply one since this exact thing has been done before by ODrive
- chris_wot 10y ago
  Well, they were granted one for peer-to-peer synchronisation... https://torrentfreak.com/dropbox-scores-patent-for-peer-to-peer-syncing-160103/ https://torrentfreak.com/dropbox-scores-patent-for-peer-to-p...

whatever_dude 10y ago

This is what Dropbox should have been. Glad they're moving towards that. (Now, if they can only implement a .dropboxignore feature...)

tedmiston 10y ago
For generated code or builds or something?
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  For random stuff that should not be synced, much like .gitignore. That'll vary depending on the person, but for me it's usually for Mac/Windows crap (.DS_Store, Thumbs.db), temporary files of any kind, node_modules, and a few others.

Jgrubb 10y ago

My boss is already sold on this. Is there any time line for a release?

lucb1e 10y ago

A bit disappointing, it's about time they finally got around to it and yet "Check back here for more info as we continue to make progress." The remaining question is whether it'll be for pro users only as well...

d_intra_venous 10y ago

Wow this is familiar lol..... My hybrid cloud storage team here at Microsoft in Silicon Valley (which was a startup called StorSimple that Microsoft acquired) already built this feature for our hybrid cloud storage virtual appliance that released a few months ago and its already in production and being used by customers..... We called it Just in Time Item Level Restore but it's the exact same thing........and looks exactly the same in behavior as well.....and we have various optimization to make it efficient and deal with latency and stuff..... (Btw we have nothing to do with one drive or one drive for business. That'a completely separate team. We only build enterprise storage devices) Ugh this is why you want to be in the consumer space , not the enterprise space. If a consumer product and enterprise product make the exact same thing/product, most people remember/see the consumer product. The race conditions and clever data structures to represent the file blobs and file system structure in the cloud to do this efficiently is actually very cool......I'm not sure how they (Dropbox) implemented it but I wonder how similar it would be to how we did it. Oh well this is my last week here in Microsoft and I'm moving to Apple in a different space so I guess I don't really care about storage anymore lol. At least at Apple the cloud services and applications will be the backend for consumer used front end applications. People will think Dropbox was the first one to do this because it's in consumer space so it's more well known...... Well actually I can link all the public announcements and stuff that was dated long before this video on the feature. We should have made a public video like this. We have videos but they were all for internal demos.... Click the Preview link (skip to item level recovery section but the PM explanation doesn't do it justice so you won't see it as the same from a technical feature point of view but it's exactly the same and behaved the same zero storage on disk but the file system thinks it's there) To accomplish all our feature we actually have low level stuff as well but I can't go into the details since I'm not allowed to so I'll leave it at that. But Dropbox is a great company and I'm glad this feature is now available to Consumers not just enterprise. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-storsimple-virtual-array-preview/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-storsi... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-availability-of-the-storsimple-virtual-array/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-av...

d_intra_venous 10y ago

alediaferia 10y ago

I remember the time when I implemented this and even more with a friend, all on our own: http://nemboapp.com http://nemboapp.com We've never had chance to push this though...

wingerlang 10y ago
Well unless it is abandoned - you're pushing it right now. And who is this targeting? For me as a "techie" the softpedia doesn't really instil any confidence and actually kind of makes it look cheap. Actually, I think for older software it is fine for some reason. But in this case it looks strange.
- alediaferia 10y ago
  Honestly, Softpedia decided to write a review about it. We didn't even reach out to them. The project is currently unmaintained, and we may open-source part of it.

grandalf 10y ago

This is great news. If it's not part of the normal non-business Dropbox I think I'm going to stop using Dropbox. This should be a common-sense feature for the base product in 2016.

XorNot 10y ago

I'm curious who all these people are who have more bandwidth and download volume then they do local storage space.

stronglikedan 10y ago
My entire Prepress department does. Granted, we use DAM systems instead of cloud storage, but some are over the wire. Some assets can easily reach 10GB or more (each).
tedmiston 10y ago
It made me wonder if people are using their remote Dropbox space for archival or as a backup solution. The business plans appear to offer unlimited file recovery back to any point in time.
bartvk 10y ago
Probably all people who bought any MacBook with 128 gigs of SSD.

seanalltogether 10y ago

I'm glad to see they are finally addressing this problem. One of the largest requested features has been better management of selective sync folders [1] and many users have left for other solutions since they still haven't fixed it in the existing client. [1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201812255-Stop-auto-inheriting-new-folders-when-using-selective-sync https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201812...

canistr 10y ago

A couple of usability questions that don't appear to have been addressed in the video: - on a Mac, if I press the spacebar to show the quick preview and start navigating down the list, will this trigger downloading of all the files? - how are older files cached? Do we simply unselect devices to remove them locally? At least with Selective Sync, I can remove files eating up my hard drive (very important on devices with 128GB SSDs/HDs or less). It's much clearer in terms of what's on disk and how to manage it with Selective Sync. With Project Infinite, I'm wondering how one would remove files locally without fully deleting the file across the Dropbox folder for every other team member.

azinman2 10y ago
You don't delete files to save space locally. They automatically keep it cached for you, and delete from cache when it's over some limit.

sanbor 10y ago

The feature it's pretty convenient, but knowing that they don't provide proper encryption and that the US government and/or Dropbox employees can access to my data it's a no-go. Also I don't like to pay for Condoleezza Rice salary. http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ http://www.drop-dropbox.com/

dimino 10y ago
The US government can get into your home, do you refuse to live anywhere because of that?
- shadowfox 10y ago
  > The US government can get into your home, do you refuse to live anywhere because of that? Not the OP. That feels like hyperbole: there are actual legal restrictions on "getting in to your home". When uploading data to a 3rd party the protections are much more limited.
  - dimino 10y ago
    Both require warrants. Are you referring to things like FISA courts and NSA wiretapping, or more mundane things like Dropbox volunteering your data? In the latter case, at least, it feels similar to your landlord letting the cops into your apartment.
    - sanbor 10y ago
      It is true that sometimes they require warrants. Also, Dropbox probably just wants access to my data to change my password in case I forget it. But technology can help me to avoid trusting them by encrypting everything in my end. Both the government and Dropbox employees are humans, and humans sometimes don't behave well. I'm willing to miss some features to get more privacy.
- sanbor 10y ago
  I live in Argentina.

rajeevk 10y ago

What will happen if I run these commands: cd dropBoxDir grep -nr someStr .

kevinSuttle 10y ago

If you'd like a solution that the NSA doesn't have backdoors to: https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs

kiwibulldog 10y ago
The NSA doesn't have backdoors into Dropbox. Dropbox has had the highest rating from the EFF regarding user rights, transparency and privacy. https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-requests-2015#dropbox-report https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-reques...
- nacs 10y ago
  That's pretty misleading. That article is judging what is written in the publicly stated privacy policy of each company. EFF has in no way verified the privacy policy is actually honored or that back-doors aren't installed in the companies' datacenters.
  - r3bl 10y ago
    And let us not forget about the whole Drop Dropbox scenario which was very popular on HN at the time it was released: http://www.drop-dropbox.com http://www.drop-dropbox.com And that Dropbox was one of the companies in the whole PRISM scandal. I still use it, mostly to transfer files between my devices, but there's no way I'm gonna be using it for anything sensitive. Everything sensitive goes to my organization's ownCloud installation which I completely trust since... well, I'm the one maintaining it.
- kevinSuttle 10y ago
  Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, did all but admit it. http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/dropboxs-drew-houston-responds-to-snowdens-privacy-criticism-its-a-trade-off/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/dropboxs-drew-houston-respo...
tjelen 10y ago
Which is an alpha-version feature of a service that's currently in private beta. Looks great and I'd like to try it out, but currently I can't. (edit: missing word)

saintfiends 10y ago

I like how they silently ignored Linux, even though it says it's cross platform and available anywhere.

zopf 10y ago

Only 4 years behind Bitcasa...

grifter2000 10y ago

I'm not sure Dropbox is the porn host they used to be but this is still pretty cool stuff

nodesocket 10y ago

I was using BitCasa Drive but they just announced they are shutting it down. I need a cloud storage solution that stores files in the "cloud" but does not sync them locally. I have about 750GB of files and looking for a replacement for BitCasa Drive. Any recommendations?

atishay811 10y ago
S3 or AWS Glacier. Transmit is a good client.

elcct 10y ago

And the poor man's solution: https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat

partiallypro 10y ago

I'm just a lonely OneDrive user, looking out in envy at DropBox. Just doesn't make sense to have both, when I have Office 365 bundled.

songgao 10y ago

Glad to know Dropbox is supporting streaming (as opposed to sync'ing) model. It didn't make much sense to keep large files shared with me in Dropbox otherwise. Keybase Filesystem [0] has been also doing this from the beginning. >“Distributed” means you can access it from any device. > “Filesystem” means that there is no sync model -- files stream in and out on demand. Among other things, that means that files on KBFS don’t take up space on your devices. Plus the files are automatically signed, and end-to-end encrypted if in /keybase/private :D [0] https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs/understanding_kbfs https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs/understanding_kbfs

ElijahLynn 10y ago

They totally just implemented Bitcasa for Dropbox. I hope Google Drive follows suit, I have been asking them to buy Bitcasa for years now, since Bitcasa launched.

FullyFunctional 10y ago

Sounds like a great idea, but not exactly revolutionary. In the 80'es I saw at least one implementation of this which migrated between tapes(!), hard drives, and memory. I always wanted this. CODA [1] implemented parts of this as well. Unfortunately, Dropbox has unencrypted access to all files and is too expensive, otherwise I'd be all over this. I'd rather allocate funds towards an open source implementation (I think something interesting would be done based on idea from CODA and NFSv4). [1] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/

wrcwill 10y ago

Can someone tell me why this is harder to do on desktop computers? Because dropbox on phones (iOS atleast) has had exactly this forever, and it makes me wonder about the technical differences. - I see all the files, and can open any of them at will. - They don't take up space on my iphone unless cached - I can select files that i want to be available offline

jeff_tyrrill 10y ago
Dropbox uses phone APIs that were designed to do exactly this. There are not "cloud storage" APIs that simulate a file system in desktop OSes. So Dropbox had to implement the syncing logic. And they also, now, have to implement the cloud file system logic to get this new feature.
pilif 10y ago
The phone OSes don't allow arbitrary views to the file system. Every file you open from your Dropbox on mobile, you open through the Dropbox app which will then copy the downloaded file over to the opening application. Dropbox has full control over which files it downloads and which files it needs to keep around. On the desktop, the file manager and every single application (by virtue of their file open dialog) get access to any file at any time. You are supposed to be able to open any file in your Dropbox without going through a dedicated Dropbox app.

Zekio 10y ago

Isn't this pretty much the same as the old OneDrive? for windows 7?

adamkochanowicz 10y ago

Feels like this is aaaalmost there. I just didn't see an option to universally keep data storage below a certain amount. If I bring down so many local copies that I exceed the space on my computer, do I then have to peck through local files and individually revert them to being reference files until I get my space back? Would be great if, once a certain threshold is reached, the oldest downloaded files would revert seamlessly.

joeblau 10y ago

Everything old is new again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3UiKkQ3GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3UiKkQ3GE. This does look very interesting though; I feel like this is the storage solution that I've been looking for.

pritam2020 10y ago

Seems like a rip off of 'Dunder Mifflin Infinity'.

cloudg53 10y ago

looks like they ripped off www.odrive.com - even stole their logo!!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

xivzgrev 10y ago

Google drive has had this feature for a while. Your Google docs are essentially shortcuts to the cloud. Im glad Dropbox is releasing this, I think it's very useful, but man is it trumped up. They have officially crossed chasm into the mainstream, when there is more marketing hype than technological innovation in a new release.

gcr 10y ago
Google Drive only 'shortcutizes' actual Google docs, which can't be edited offline anyway. If you put a PDF or a large media file (or anything that takes up space anyway) into Google Drive, you don't get a placeholder, you get your entire video collection. I consider Dropbox's feature a huge improvement over that.
- bartvk 10y ago
  Actually, some Google Docs can be edited offline. I once tried to figure out what is possible and what isn't. Basically, you can edit Docs and Slides offline in Chrome. Drawings and Sheets can only be viewed, not edited offline. This is 2013 information though, some things may have changed for the better.

siranachronist 10y ago

sigh once again Microsoft is ahead of the curve, but drops the ball and lets another company swoop in

joshschreuder 10y ago

So this is pretty cool, but my question is - does it solve a long term problem? It seems like storage is one thing that continues to expand in size very fast, and decrease in cost in kind. We'll soon have many TB SSDs for cheaper than traditional hard disk drives, so I'm not convinced this solves a real future consumer need. Maybe there are other uses beyond space saving that I'm missing.

microcolonel 10y ago

I'm not a Dropbox user, but I sorta assumed that this was already the case. I use sshfs when I'm fully connected, and I don't really know how people could get by being limited by their endpoint's storage up until now.

dilly_li 10y ago

I think the video could be better polished... I have this thought that all the big IT companies hire professional video editors nowadays.

denibertovic 10y ago

And they conveniently don't mention Linux support.... Sigh.. Also interesting thing to note is how everybody came down on keybase FS because the sync is on-demand. Most people citing dropbox and things like "if it was a viable option dropbox would do it and not have full sync". Well now... :D

Brajeshwar 10y ago

One should look at ExpanDrive. It does it for many Cloud Storage Services, including Dropbox. I like it and use it. http://www.expandrive.com/ http://www.expandrive.com/

Tanax 10y ago

Have anyone speculated how this is achieved, from a technical standpoint? How would one go about to start creating something like this on their own that works against e.g. a NAS?

brisance 10y ago

BitTorrent Sync has had a similar feature for a while now. http://help.getsync.com/hc/en-us/articles/204754669-What-is-a-BTS-file- http://help.getsync.com/hc/en-us/articles/204754669-What-is-...

lispython 10y ago

This remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike. [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

tripzilch 10y ago

I missed the part where they said "we also implemented a strict 'No War Criminals' policy for our Board of Directors" and I could allow myself any amount of respect for this organisation again. Seriously I can't. This won't go away until she goes away. If I would, I would commit the sin "out of sight is out of mind". This, yes including the cynical remark I began my post with, is really the only way I can vote or voice my utter disapproval of such kinds of people. We shouldn't let that be forgotten and buried. I wish I could say, but this has nothing to do with Dropbox as a software/datastorage infrastructure company. It should have nothing to do with them, and still it does, she's just there as if she's not a despiccable human being responsible for the murder and torture of innocent people. What is such a person even doing in the board of directors of a company like Dropbox? It doesn't make any sense. But that doesn't mean we should, ever, just forget and shut up about it. It's not a tiny thing. It's not even a medium large thing. The only reason she's not currently being tried as an actual war criminal is because the USA refuses to acknowledge the ICC and therefore by logical conclusion, er force, can never be tried for war crimes. So yeah nice project, features, whatever. Too bad about the giant death shadow of Condoleezza Rice obscuring my ability to appreciate it.

vocatus_gate 10y ago
Take a breath there buddy