
Dropbox’s Smart Sync lets users open a file stored only in the cloud like normal - hoov
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/30/dropboxs-smart-sync-lets-users-open-a-file-stored-only-in-the-cloud-like-any-normal-file/
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kilroy123
So will this ever be available for paying customers that aren't on a business
plan? If not, that is incredibly frustrating.

I pay for their service every month. I am not a business, so why should I pay
more to have a feature that should be standard? Plus loads of features I don't
want or need?

~~~
antoncohen
The FAQ[1] says:

> Smart Sync is available in early access for Dropbox Business users. It is
> not yet available for individual accounts.

Maybe they are rolling it out to Business customers first because they think
they can provide better support to them?

I've had Smart Sync (Infinite) on my personal Dropbox account for a long time.
It is awesome. When I recently added Dropbox to a new computer it started with
all the files "in the cloud". It was so nice to have all my files available in
the Finder and from command line, but not have to sync my whole Dropbox.

[1] [https://www.dropbox.com/help/9293](https://www.dropbox.com/help/9293)

~~~
jpalomaki
Could be also just a way to push people towards business edition. This is a
pain point when you have lots of data in the Dropbox folder. Managing things
with the current "selective sync" is painful and if you have lots of data, the
full sync may take ages.

This is handy for example for the use case that you travel with clean laptop
and sync needed stuff at the destination.

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chias
Local filesystem interface to files which exist "only" on the cloud is
basically the way Keybase FS operates. If this is a "killer feature" for you,
consider giving it a try. The downsides at the moment are (a) alpha software,
and (b) 10 gig limit. It is free though, very convenient, and does a lot of
things "right" (by my way of thinking).

[https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs](https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs)

~~~
StavrosK
The major thing it does wrong is that it mounts the directory in the fs root,
rather than my homedir. That means it was effectively invisible (if it's not
in my homedir, I never see it), so I never used it. Dropbox, on the other
hand, is always right in my face at ~/Dropbox.

It's too bad, because kbfs really gets many things right.

~~~
khc
it's just fuse, right? looks like you can control the mountpoint:
[https://github.com/keybase/kbfs/blob/master/kbfsfuse/main.go](https://github.com/keybase/kbfs/blob/master/kbfsfuse/main.go)

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petters
> Smart Sync will be available for all Dropbox Business and enterprise
> customers today for early access.

I really hope us regular users will get it soon as well. This is great and how
file syncing should work.

~~~
robocaptain
I've been a dropbox pro user for many years, but have lately gotten the
impression that they (dropbox) are focused on Dropbox Business and not so much
regular consumers. Curious if other people have had similar experiences?

~~~
petters
My impression as well. I am a long-time pro user. I don't mind that much,
except that I really want this feature.

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AlecSchueler
It's interesting how much this sounds like NFS. NFS works great, and serves a
fairly obvious use case, but obviously requires some working knowledge of Unix
and ssh technologies etc. Smart Sync gives a one-click install and forget
solution. It makes me wonder why it took so long for this to be made, and what
other things we Unix-heads take for granted that could easily be ported and
marketed to a wider audience.

~~~
geofft
So, like NFS - what happens if your internet connection is interrupted while
you're reading the file? What happens if another computer saves to the same
file while you're reading it?

Dropbox has smart people and I'm sure they would have wanted a feature like
this from day 1, so if they're introducing it, I'm sure they have good
answers. I'm just curious what they are!

~~~
pjc50
NFS will, depending on mount options, block forever or start returning errors
if the connection is lost. It's not really suitable for non-LAN use for a
number of reasons.

It also will let you overwrite or interleave files unless both sides use
advisory locking.

~~~
geofft
Yup. We use NFS at scale at $dayjob (including across continents, which is
sometimes exciting) and I'm pretty sure everyone wishes we had something with
the simplicity of Dropbox.

I'm curious how Dropbox has made this safe to use for people who don't want to
think about things like "close-to-open consistency" or "stale file handle".

~~~
varenc
one cool thing I've seen "Smart Sync" do...on OS X it seems to fill out the
thumbnail cache for images that are "online only". This means you can see the
preview for what an image looks like without forcing the client to download
it.

Also local files behave exactly like other local files so in that case (the
typical case) all that pain you feel with NFS/FUSE goes away

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AlexandrB
I think I'll pass on giving Dropbox a direct line into my computer's kernel.

~~~
LogicX
It's had that for a long time. one of the hallmarks of their OSX tight
integration has been in memory patching of different OS versions to display
dropbox files tightly integrated with finder.

be scared.

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BadassFractal
Any chance they will let us store more than 1TB on the individual paid version
of the product? I have a terabytes worth of RAW file format photographs that I
currently have to store on S3, but I'd much rather keep everything on Dropbox
if I can.
[https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/160](https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/160)

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desireco42
I gave up on Dropbox long time ago. Maybe I am wrong, but with data loss and
other issues, especially limit on space, I found BTSync better suited for my
needs. It's been working for years now.

I think Dropbox could've innovated much more then they did, to make their
offering more compelling to guys like me. They didn't and that is unfortunate.
I think they feel pressured now but it might be a little late and their
solutions are kind of artificial and inspired by others... (paper for example)

~~~
danieldk
I currently use both, but I am thinking of switching fully to Resilio Sync.
Given Dropbox disregard for proper security, I don't want them to run in
kernel space (via a kext).

The only downside of Resilio Sync is that the sharing story is not yet great.

~~~
desireco42
I've been using it for at least 2 yrs if not more now. Zero issues.

Well, once I deleted files in misguided effort to move them. They were deleted
from all machines :). It wasn't a big deal, it just shows it works.

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odabaxok
Dropbox's first blog post about Smart Sync (aka Infinite) and discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11570888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11570888)

~~~
jessriedel
What's happened since then? Is it that the project was announced back then and
is now available to businesses, as predicted? Or is that it was available to
businesses back then when announced, and will be available to individuals?

~~~
odabaxok
I haven't read both articles thoroughly, but two quotes from the articles will
answer your questions:

Blog post: "Project Infinite _will_ enable users to seamlessly and securely
access all their Dropbox files from the desktop, regardless of how much space
they have available on their hard drives."

This post: "Dropbox _today released_ Smart Sync..."

So the blog post was a demo about feature in the future, while this article
says it is already released.

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nvr219
I wish I could enforce this as dropbox administrator to my users... like when
they install, have "smart sync" on specific folders instead of default to
downloading everything.

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abalone
How does this compare technically to iCloud[1] and (lesser known) Upthere[2]?
And any other cloud storage providers that treat local files as purgeable / do
selective syncing.

For example one major difference I've noticed is iCloud can sync while asleep
(Power Nap). This has proven to be _very_ useful with my iCloud Photo Library,
which has tons of syncing to do every day and night over a slow connection.

Another distinction with Apple's approach, maybe not directly comparable to
Dropbox Business, is how it is integrated with apps. I mentioned photos, but
it also covers iTunes music and movies/TV. It lets it be smarter than a purely
filesystem level sync, like downloading photo previews and purging movies only
after you've watched them. In other words it has a direct Dropbox competitor
in iCloud Drive, but also adds domain-specific syncing.

Are there any advantages to Dropbox's approach?

[1] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206996](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT206996)

[2] [https://upthere.com/technology](https://upthere.com/technology)

~~~
Longhanks
Dropbox is cross-platform. I'd love iCloud features on my Linux Desktop, but
I'm unable to consume it.

~~~
abalone
iCloud supports Windows, at least:

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT204283)

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johnhattan
So how does this work with stuff like virus scanners or text-searches that
read all the bytes of all the files in a hierarchy?

Does it load up all the files locally and then LRU-discard them only to load
them all up again the next time the virus-scanner runs?

~~~
BadassFractal
Would also be curious to know how this would work with something like
Lightroom that can operate on pre-computed downsampled versions of the RAW
originals.

~~~
ChristianGeek
If this would allow me to keep the original image files in the cloud and only
pull down the ones I want to work with, that would be awesome! I have the
downsampled images on my laptop now and the originals on an external hard
drive that's backed up to the cloud, but it would obviously be a lot more
convenient to have the hard drive hold the backup.

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dkonofalski
I'm really interested in the last part of the article where the file is store
locally (with checks against space) for very large files and where only the
diff is synced between the cloud and the local machine. That might work
wonders for people that share large files constantly but it might also be a
headache if you're trying to determine a diff for a binary file instead of
something simple like ASCII text.

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akeck
ExpanDrive on Mac and Win gives the same experience, but with almost any cloud
storage backend. I combine it with unlimited Amazon Cloud Drive.

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praveenperera
I've wanted this forever now, if they enable this on normal pro accounts I
will finally pay for dropbox.

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mixedCase
This has been available since forever in any of the Dropbox FUSE
implementations.

~~~
zer0t3ch
But muh Windows

~~~
mixedCase
I've never used it, but Dokany seems to open a FUSE-shaped hole in a Windows
kernel driver.

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mankash666
Wonder how this compares to NFS/pNFS.

~~~
coldtea
It doesn't. It's basically offering local proxies for remote files.

NFS was/is a networked filesystem protocol, where multiple clients access the
same remote volumes.

~~~
Groxx
Is that substantially different somehow?

~~~
coldtea
Yes, in the same way that ssh to a server to get a file is not the same as a
hard or soft link.

~~~
Groxx
If that hard / soft link hides an ssh connection behind it, and the ssh
connection is presented as SSHFS[1] (since that's practically what NFS is),
then I really don't see much of a difference. Protocol, implementation, sure.
But it's the same end result.

[1]: [https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs](https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs)

~~~
giovannibajo1
The main difference is that you are always one click away from switching
between the "nfs mode" (so to speak) and the fully cached offline mode, which
is the default for Dropbox and is unavailable with network filesystems. And I
mean switch file-by-file or directory-by-directory.

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niij
Is this available for Linux? I couldn't find information one way or the other
on Dropbox's site.

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nkkollaw
iCloud removed a 800MB Photoshop file while I was working on it today, and I
had to download it again (luckily I had saved my work, but the file was still
open).

I didn't expect that. I guess if it's open but not modified it isn't locked?

These things are not that intuitive, just yet.

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
Are you running out of local disk space by any chance? macOS has a feature
where files stored in iCloud are removed from the local computer if disk space
is getting low.

You can change the setting in System Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Drive
Options. Uncheck “Optimize Mac Storage”.

~~~
nkkollaw
Yes. That's the featured that caused the file to be removed.

It's just that I didn't expect macOS to remove a file while it was open.

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beached_whale
If the business package could upload photo's from phone devices I would
consider it.

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raverbashing
This sounds like NFS for the .js age

Slower, buggier and less reliable (and I mean, yes, compared to NFS)

~~~
matthewmacleod
You have literally no idea what the performance or UX of this service will be
like, but you've decided to have a pop at it anyway. That's not a very
endearing quality. You'll recall of course the similar short-sighted comments
when Dropbox first debuted…

Have a look at some of the technology - there is some interesting stuff in
there - before writing it off.

~~~
Spooky23
Normally I'd agree, but there's a pretty substantial history of vendors trying
to solve these problems in the filesystem context, and it's pretty clear that
it's _hard_ problem from many different perspectives. It's very reasonable to
the skeptical.

Microsoft gave up in OneDrive (where they used stubbing for awhile), and moved
to a model where they, in Windows 10 deliver a filesystem replacement that
looks and smells like a traditional filesystem to end users, but is in fact a
Dropbox-like mobile client.

I'm sure that when I get to use it (I'm merely a chump paying $100/year for
Dropbox) it will be great for 90% of my needs. But there are _many_ edge cases
where things will break for users or applications that don't handle high
latency file operations well.

If anyone has a chance to pull this off with a UX that people can grok, it
will be Dropbox.

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Animats
Haven't they had that for years, except with more local caching?

~~~
zuccs
No. You could turn off syncing a folder completely (Selective Sync).

This is a rebrand of their Project Infinite
([https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/2016/04/announcing-
projec...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/2016/04/announcing-project-
infinite/)).

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sikhote
Still no .ignore list :(

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dpratt
I ditched Dropbox years ago - I have no tolerance for any platform that
requires an invisible (and not terribly inspectable) patch to my kernel.

Plus, it ate batteries like nobody's business.

