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This is a very interesting problem, espeicially since consumer computing devices quickly shunted to small storage space when SSD's arrived. A few years ago, a l
by ramLlama 12y ago
This is a very interesting problem, espeicially since consumer computing devices quickly shunted to small storage space when SSD's arrived. A few years ago, a laptop with 500GB of hard drive space was rather small! Nowadays, a 500GB SSD is top-tier. Granted, SSD capacity is quickly rising, but with the combination of small computing like phones and tablets, space is at a premium.
Funnily enough, this problem has been solved before! If you look at distributed file systems, especially something like Coda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coda_(file_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coda_(file_system)), they are designed to make the local computer a "thin client for storage". Basically, local storage is used as a cache for the main copy on the server, and this behavior is transparent to user applications via the FS driver.
Dropbox uses a user-space program to sync the files and cannot intercept system calls. As such, they had no choice but to synchronize all of it rather than bringing things in "on-demand" and releasing local copies that are not used. Nowadays, this can easily be done via FUSE driver in Linux. I do not know if something like FUSE exists on other platforms though.
Overall, I personally love the idea of a local machine being a "cache" for the server copy. However, the technical challenges are greater than a simple mirroring scheme, and there may be UX issues as well.
- btown 12y agoDokan for Windows (last updated 2011) and MacFUSE for OS X do exist, but they're not battle-tested, to say the least. It wouldn't be wise for Dropbox to stake its reputation on such unreliable software.
- jrochkind1 12y agoMacFuse worked well when it was first released, but it has not been maintained in years and has no maintainers and does not really work with any recent OSX versions at the moment. It looks like there might be something called OSXFuse which might be more recent and maintained, but I haven't looked at it, it also might not be.
- hemancuso 12y agoOSXFuse is very well battle tested. We use it in ExpanDrive. CBFS by eldos is a commercial userspace filesystem lib for windows. We also use that.
- jrochkind1 12y agoawesome, thanks for the info! I will check out OSXFuse.
- eps 12y agoCommercial FUSE/Dokan analog for Windows costs around 15K for an all-inclusive package. I'm sure Dropbox can afford it if they are interested in pursuing this option.
- ryankshaw 12y agoyour comment is spot on! see my other comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8358527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8358527 spacemonkey does exactly that
- ramLlama 12y agoThanks! Spacemonkey looks terrific and is pretty much what I envision! I often feel that with the move to "cloud computing" over the last decade, we have essentially made a dichotomy between working "locally" and working "in the cloud". However, they really should be seamless! The cloud should extend your computational resources and make it more accessible, not replace it! With things like spacemonkey, Office 365 and other "seamless" apps, it seems that we are finally learning how to make things be location and device independent. Cloud computing is the vanishing mediator that is finally starting to vanish!