
Dropbox Project Infinite - maguay
https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/2016/04/announcing-project-infinite/
======
antoncohen
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.

~~~
KindDragon
So, if I try search inside Dropbox or Documents folder it will download all
files from Dropbox to my computer ?

~~~
mnsc
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.

~~~
Angostura
Perhaps the integration will extend to triggering a search on the back end.

~~~
mjs7231
I suppose any company that is giving all their encrypted data to Dropbox to
begin with may be OK with it. But most companies are already sketched out by
the mere fact that their data is accessible to anyone outside the company.

In any event, if they were to index and provide search as a service as well, I
wouldn't think it's something they do quietly. It would most likely include
it's own huge marketing campaign.

------
dkopi
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
+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.

~~~
faitswulff
Huh, I use Dropbox for a lot of photos as well. That makes me wonder how
Project Infinite would handle thumbnails.

~~~
acdha
Ditto - in particular, I'm curious whether it has any concept of partial
staging so e.g. enough of a RAW file could be downloaded to display an
embedded thumbnail but the transfer would halt at the next block if the file
handle was closed

------
pritambaral
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
Dropbox can't seriously write a "Universal Compatability" headline and not
include Linux support. Disappointing.

~~~
tzakrajs
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
While letting handle the Kernel-builtin bcache all the dirty/difficult
caching.

------
bobsoap
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/)

~~~
JBiserkov
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.

~~~
manigandham
Onedrive had similar same icon overlays to notify if the file was really
downloaded or not. Dropbox is going to run into the same problem with
placeholders where people go offline thinking they have the entire file.

~~~
SolarNet
This is a tools problem. People need to know how to use the tools in a
business or let them go. You don't keep carpenter around who blames power
tools not working the way he expects when he never charges the batteries.

Dropbox's response could be, "Hey we have training seminars for that".

------
dkyc
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
> ..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
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
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)

~~~
GordonS
It's rather basic though - you can only select/unselect folders within your
fixed, root Dropbox folder.

~~~
tedmiston
The version I have also allows you to navigate the folder hierarchy and select
any nested folder.

~~~
GordonS
Yes... any folder as long as it's in the hierarchy of the Dropbox folder?

------
_kyran
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
>> 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
The Android app

------
megapatch
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.

~~~
burkemw3
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/...](https://plus.sandbox.google.com/108313527900507320366/posts/ZrgdgLhV3NG)
and [http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-
discuss/...](http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-
discuss/2011-November/003162.html) on the subject.

------
rethab
Mac and Windows means 'universal compatibility'? :(

~~~
NikhilVerma
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.

~~~
teach
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.

------
jasonkester
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
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.

------
kyriakos
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
It's removed in 10? That's kind of a disaster, as it's critical to making the
Surface and various tablets usable.

~~~
kyriakos
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.

------
yoz-y
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.

~~~
michaelmior
Do you mean depreciated?

~~~
yoz-y
I do indeed!

------
CamatHN
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
"the fact that everyone has 128GB Surfaces"

This seems vaguely astroturfy.

------
andr
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
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.

------
canistr
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
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.

------
songgao
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)

------
radarsat1
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
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...

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

~~~
burkemw3
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
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.

------
seanalltogether
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/201812...](https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-
us/community/posts/201812255-Stop-auto-inheriting-new-folders-when-using-
selective-sync)

------
tbrock
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
You can just redirect a port with SSH and then use Samba/CIFS or NFS if you
are worried about sshfs.

~~~
tbrock
I'm more worried about a shitty samba/cifs implementation! That is about the
only worse thing I could think of.

------
kevinSuttle
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
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-
reques...](https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-
requests-2015#dropbox-report)

~~~
nacs
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
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.

------
equalsnil
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.

------
lispython
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)

------
nanoanderson
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
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…

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

------
JorgeGT
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
I don't see why not. I assume they're managing all of this at the file system
level.

------
altharaz
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?

------
FullyFunctional
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/)

------
fulafel
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?

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

~~~
seanieb
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)

------
gumby
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
Lets see how it copes with a nice big Photos.app library

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

------
whatever_dude
This is what Dropbox should have been. Glad they're moving towards that.

(Now, if they can only implement a .dropboxignore feature...)

~~~
tedmiston
For generated code or builds or something?

~~~
whatever_dude
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.

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

~~~
tedmiston
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.

------
wrcwill
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

~~~
pilif
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.

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

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

------
nashashmi
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.

------
Brajeshwar
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/)

------
alediaferia
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
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
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
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.

------
mahyarm
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
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.

------
Tanax
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?

------
Spooky23
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?

------
adamkochanowicz
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.

------
xivzgrev
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
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
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.

------
jorangreef
How is this implemented on Windows vs OS X?

~~~
dkopi
It can't. This is the type of features that have to be developed for each OS
separately.

~~~
jorangreef
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
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/cc1...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/cc144095\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

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
If you look in the Dropbox install the driver is already being distributed on
Mac and Windows. It's a filter driver.

------
joeblau
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.

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

------
denibertovic
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

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

------
pj_mukh
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
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
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.

------
nodesocket
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
S3 or AWS Glacier. Transmit is a good client.

------
th0br0
So this is similar to Cern VMFS presented a few days ago here with the FS
being mutable? Neat!

------
microcolonel
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.

------
lucb1e
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...

------
codezero
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.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

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

~~~
sensecall
I was wondering the same thing. Been desperately wanting this feature for a
long time – are there any other services offering it?

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

------
aroman
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.

~~~
fulafel
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.

------
ElijahLynn
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.

------
dorfsmay
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?

------
partiallypro
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.

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

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

~~~
danieldk
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.)

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

------
joshschreuder
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.

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

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

------
pritam2020
Seems like a rip off of 'Dunder Mifflin Infinity'.

------
rajeevk
What will happen if I run these commands:

cd dropBoxDir

grep -nr someStr .

------
chris_wot
Have they got a patent on this?

~~~
trishume
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
Well, they were granted one for peer-to-peer synchronisation...

[https://torrentfreak.com/dropbox-scores-patent-for-peer-
to-p...](https://torrentfreak.com/dropbox-scores-patent-for-peer-to-peer-
syncing-160103/)

------
zopf
Only 4 years behind Bitcasa...

------
d_intra_venous
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-
storsi...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-storsimple-
virtual-array-preview/)

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-
av...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-availability-
of-the-storsimple-virtual-array/)

~~~
d_intra_venous
oh wait our PM did make videos on this.

(He reacted to my post saying he spent countless hours making videos so he was
offended I say we didn't make videos. )

Ooops I didn't know. He should have linked them to hacker news.

(Start from the 3:00 where we already populated the share, and then watch till
the end)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_OX-5WzHIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_OX-5WzHIA)

------
cloudg53
looks like they ripped off www.odrive.com - even stole their logo!!

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

~~~
robzyb
"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
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).

------
elcct
And the poor man's solution:

[https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat](https://github.com/parkomat/parkomat)

------
imaginenore
So it's a mounted SSH drive with some local caching?

Like SSHFS?

~~~
seanieb
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
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.

------
grifter2000
I'm not sure Dropbox is the porn host they used to be but this is still pretty
cool stuff

------
sashk
Finally.

But for me it's too late.

------
gkya
Oh my marketing, isn't this basically NFS?

~~~
pjc50
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.

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

