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Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- urza 10y agoThanks to dropbox inifit I discovered Infinit.sh - http://infinit.sh/ http://infinit.sh/ which I got really excited about. I wonder what is their experience with using FUSE and DOKANY..
- skrowl 10y agoI have a similar success story. Thanks to Dropbox spamming me with "OMG UPGRADE!" every time I clicked anything, I found out about SyncThing (specifically SyncTrayzor for Windows). Thanks, Dropbox!
- howeyc 10y agoThanks for the heads up on SyncTrayzor! I was running syncthing manually every time I log in.
- aw3c2 10y agoAlso checkout Seafile if you want something more Dropboxy.
- urza 10y agoI am happy user of Syncthing[1] myself. I currently sync 1.5 TB of data with it. And on windows the SyncTrayzor[2] is excellent. I also use android client[3] as a one-way backup of my whole SD card from phone to my other computers. 1: https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/ 2: https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor 3: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.syncthingandroid https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.sy...
- joeblau 10y agoIs there any way to incorporate this into iOS or Android so that you can backup to your infinite drive instead of iCloud or Google Drive?
- mrlinx 10y agoGot excited as well, even signups for news on their slack group. But nothing so far, not even access to the beta binaries.
- andrewmunsell 10y agoAs long as you're not on Windows, they have binaries available to try it out now-- I just went through their Getting Started guide (http://infinit.sh/get-started http://infinit.sh/get-started) on my Mac.
- ccrone 10y agoContact me (chris) on Slack, depending on your platform we may have a beta for you to try
- fizzbatter 10y agoSame, i moved all my storage over to Infinit on an ongoing trial run. Funny too, because if Infinit works out, i'll be canceling my Dropbox plan.
- medecau 10y agoI just hope inifinit.sh delivers on open sourcing. https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues/1 https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues/1
- cadeuh 10y agoDon't hesitate to come to our IRC or Slack channel, we'll happily talk about our experience :)
- nimish 10y agoSo instead of using a FS shim to userspace on security grounds they decided to distribute a custom kext that's closed source -- ie a great way for normal bugs to turn into dangerous ones? I'm not sure I understand the logic here
- SG- 10y agoThe blog article goes into great detail, for performance.
- danieldk 10y agoExactly, we should be moving in the opposite direction: make as much software as possible user-space and sandboxed. I assume a party as large as Dropbox can request Apple to extend the APIs where necessary?
- oddevan 10y agoEspecially since Apple already has! There are new extension APIs in El Capitan specifically designed for apps like Box and Dropbox to extend the Finder. And they also released APIs designed to eliminate the need for KEXTs for virtualization products (see: Veertu and Docker for Mac beta), so I would expect them to also have/make APIs for Dropbox's use case as well. I was excited for this. Was.
- dontblink 10y agoBelieve it or not, their APIs have very real deficiencies. To the point where they are subpar to custom solutions. E.g. is how extensions only allow for one application to be active at a time (i.e. you cannot run Google Drive and Dropbox simultaneously and have file overlay icons).
- coldtea 10y ago>I assume a party as large as Dropbox can request Apple to extend the APIs where necessary? As large? Dropbox is like a fly to Apple. Not to mention competitors. And they haven't budged for much larger parties. So, unless it's something that Apple intends to do anyway, Dropbox's request will don't have much success.
- darwingr 10y agoI suppose "deeper" also being the strategic direction they're taking with this?
- jxy 10y agoFor a real "deeper" blog they could have given us some benchmarks comparing good implementations on FUSE and kernel space. They instead gave a meaningless diagram to argue about performance. Toward closed source binary kernel blob they go, and out I jump.
- danieldk 10y agoAs a paying Pro customer, I am a bit worried how intent they seem to be on pushing the business/enterprise products. First of all, Dropbox the web application is spammed with Dropbox Business advertising. I am already paying. And, no, my employer (a European university) is unlikely to roll out Dropbox Business. So please stop bugging me :(. Secondly, more and more features are rolled out to business users first. Why? Are regular paying customers going to be treated as second-class citizens to bully them into business accounts?
- radicaldreamer 10y agoI killed my Dropbox Pro account and upgraded iCloud storage because the integration with the Photos app in iOS is way superior and the lack of something like Project Infinite, which results in a lot of manual folder management for my long tail of old docs. Dropbox's core sync technology is still unmatched, but the Pro offering leaves a lot to be desired over some of the better integrated experiences of Google and Apple's photos products. I expect this to become even more of an issues after WWDC.
- bad_user 10y agoGoing for iCloud, that's an odd decision, frankly. I would have understood Google Drive, but not iCloud. When it comes to my personal photos archive, I care about 2 things: (1) occasional sharing and (2) keeping my huge archive safe. Dropbox does both, iCloud does neither. iCloud sharing only works with people using iDevices and I don't have many acquaintances or family members with a preference for Apple. Dropbox allows for publishing to a web link, with or without a password, with or without an expiration date. And that's cool, because I can send that link to anybody. Cross-platform and all that. In terms of safety, I keep an extra offline backup by means of a home Linux server that's almost always on, synchronizing my Dropbox and does the occasional local backup. It has a big hard-drive of course. Dropbox works on Linux, iCloud does not. Also Dropbox provides a 30-days history of all changes and a 1-year extended history for extra cost. I got the 1-year extended history. With iCloud get some Ransomware and watch in horror how all of your photos are gone.
- ja30278 10y agoSo..the cost of an extra kernel/userspace switch was too much for a file request that is going to be serviced by a server on the other side of the internet?..really?
- ori_b 10y agoPretty much, it's not going to matter: http://www.csl.sri.com/users/gehani/papers/SAC-2010.FUSE.pdf http://www.csl.sri.com/users/gehani/papers/SAC-2010.FUSE.pdf. Putting ext3 into userspace led to slightly less than 10% performance degradation on postmark. Fuse really isn't an issue in most cases, and I can't imagine that this makes a huge difference on most workloads.
- olavgg 10y agoThere may be other reasons that we are not aware of, anyway learning how to build your own vfs most likely have huge advantages in the long run.
- viraptor 10y agoExactly what I noticed about it. Also worth noting that the context switch here may matter for the practically tiny amount of people living in the right places in the US. It's pretty much a definition of a first world problem. Meanwhile, I'll be here with my 200ms ping to S3 wondering why would they waste all that time/complexity just to avoid a context switch. Reminds me of the performance arguments for kdbus.
- brian_cloutier 10y agoThe OS pre-extension doesn't know which files are stored locally and which are placeholders for remote files. You can't just selectively use FUSE for the remote ones. Using FUSE makes every file operation slower.
- fanf2 10y agoIn most cases it will be serviced by a locally cached file.
- seanalltogether 10y agoI'm a bit scared to figure out what this means for my users scanning their hard drives with Space Gremlin. I go through standard file apis to scan all the folders on the users system. Will it end up scanning the entire users online filesystem and not just the actual local files? Will getting file meta data on all those online files end up causing a fetch to DB and grind the whole scan to a halt? I've been resisting building a custom HFS+ reader for years but apples expanded use of hard links plus whatever DB is about to unleash might require a new approach.
- astrange 10y agoDo you use getattrlistbulk() or do you only use cross platform APIs?
- sneak 10y agoLest we forget: this is the company that let anyone on the internet log in to any Dropbox user account they wanted with any arbitrary value for the password. https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2011/06/yesterdays-authentication-bug/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2011/06/yesterdays-authent...
- flyt 10y agoHi Sneak! As you're no doubt aware, people change over the years. They learn from mistakes, improve how they live their lives, and become better over time. Companies tend to be the same way, learning along the way and maturing, especially when it comes to business processes and risk-related parts of the business. It's entirely possible that the Dropbox of 2016 isn't like the Dropbox of five years ago in many concrete ways. For example, they could have hired new people, improved testing and release processes, and become more serious about engineering discipline. Many startups early-on make dumb mistakes and go on to great success and professionalization, but we should have both empathy and forgiveness for them in the long term. Dropbox has recently demonstrated a focused attention on large scale, challenging engineering projects (building a replacement for S3 in-house from scratch, writing kernel extensions, etc) and a reasonable observer might conclude that they've learned from the mistakes of 2011.
- sneak 10y agoRegardless of how much they've changed, 2011 Dropbox was decidedly not two guys in a garage and their complete and total lack of security engineering diligence and multiple overlapping process failures that must have occurred to lead to that incident call every future "At Dropbox we take security seriously" into question. (See also: "goto fail".) At some point, Dropbox clearly didn't take security seriously. They claim otherwise now. The question is now "at what point should we believe them?" It's subjective and my opinion is that the 2011 management that didn't take security seriously then probably still doesn't take it that seriously now - they've simply hired underlings to worry about it. I have experiences with companies that have security in their DNA from day one, and I've {observed, worked with, been a customer of} a whole fuckton more who bolt it on later once time and money permit. Most of the latter do not actually care one whit about security, it's just one more "avoid existential threat x" box they have to tick as their business grows. Google falls into the former. Dropbox and Slack and LinkedIn fall into the latter. https://www.troyhunt.com/we-take-security-seriously-otherwise/ https://www.troyhunt.com/we-take-security-seriously-otherwis... There is no reasonable amount of time that needs to pass until I willingly let a Dropbox or a Slack or a LinkedIn run code in my workstation's kernel. Maybe that makes me a jerk - if it does, I apologize. PS: That's not how you spell my username.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hemancuso 10y agoIf you want to try out a FUSE-style Dropbox filesystem, I write one. It's available on Mac, Windows and soon Linux. [shameless plug] http://www.expandrive.com http://www.expandrive.com The bit I don't quite understand about Project infinite is that you still have to manually decide what gets sync'd or not. It's also not a network volume, so things like virus scanners or search indexers can just page in-data? And if you want to offload data, you just move it from one folder to another which still eats space.
- blindfly 10y agoI've looked at your software a few times before. I've also tried to reach out to you before. To date I've never seen a response from you and I've moved on. I'm not stoked to see you're available to drop your product name in a thread about another company but inquiries to your own go unanswered.
- spydertennis 10y agoMaybe he doesn't want to talk to you. I'm not stoked to see you commenting about your personal issues.
- blindfly 10y agoWell if he didn't want to talk to me, he might rethink sending messages to people blindly asking them to get in touch.
- spydertennis 10y agoFair.
- hemancuso 10y agojmancuso@expandrive.com if you want to reconnect, sorry if I've missed an email in the past.
- 10y ago
- rcarmo 10y agoNot really enthusiastic about file syncing moving into kernel space. I get that this is necessary for on-demand fetching of files, but I worry about stability and failure modes - I can see apps stalling and/or getting confused when file open calls fail because the network drops, etc. Reminds me of the Coda/AFS2 days, really (those weren't as much fun as you'd think, back when we opened files over X.25 links...) Bottom line: I hope it's configurable and that I can switch it off (preferably by default).
- cs2818 10y agoWell I just became one of the dozens of people that monitors loaded kernel extensions.
- wineisfine 10y agoOn box.com only admins can move & rename folders, which makes alot more sense to start off with. With this solution, it seems everyone can still rename the folders. Too bad their (box.com) support is the worst customer experience I've ever whitnessed.
- tbrock 10y agoThis seems incredibly over engineered. One less system call? Great, but I'd rather the service just be cheaper. Skip the blog posts and just ship it already!