Dropbox is today announcing a new upcoming feature of its platform, codenamed Project Infinite. When Infinite rolls out, you’ll be able to see all your files and folders stored on Dropbox in the Finder, but they won’t take up any space until they are needed. The company is currently targeting the feature at business users.
This means your Dropbox storage can be far larger in total size than your local disk (as is common with modern setups of 1 TB Dropbox tiers and small SSDs) with on-demand instantaneous access to any file at any time over the Internet …
So how does that work? What’s happening is that the Dropbox app shows placeholder items in your Finder for all files synced in the cloud. However, the contents of these files are never downloaded until they are clicked on and need opening. This concept is more easily explained by the demo video, embedded below.
Obviously, if you do not have network access but urgently require a particular file that isn’t already locally cached, then you are out of luck. However, Dropbox Project Infinite includes a ‘Save local copy’ feature that allows users to pin specific folders and files ahead of time, to guarantee they will be kept downloaded locally on the system.
For instance, if you are going to an important meeting abroad where the availability of Interent is spotty, you can choose the project files to save locally for the duration of the trip. Locally synced files are marked with the usual green checkmark.
The placeholders include metadata like filenames, modified dates and sizes just like actual files. Users can drag and drop placeholder files and folders to rearrange the logical layout of their documents too … all without having to download the file contents. Placeholder content is identified by a grey cloud annotation on the icon.
Overall, though, it means Dropbox users on the desktop no longer need to worry about filling up their local disk with files when they use their storage. Until Infinite, the only solution was to selectively sync specific folders but this meant unsynced folders were simply not visible within the operating system at all, unless downloaded in full.
Project Infinite is currently being targeted at business users, who want to deploy their intranet over Dropbox, containing terabytes of information. The feature has already been rolled out to a select number of partners but a date for a widespread release has not yet been given. Project Infinite will work on OS X and Windows computers.
Get more information about the upcoming feature on the Dropbox blog.
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An excellent idea which makes a lot of sense. As someone who uses Google Drive a lot however I’d also like to see the same from Google.
I’ve had a bad experience using Google Drive. Too bad it has issues syncing some file types.
I also had those.
If it doesn’t do its basic job…
I believe this shows how good Dropbox is compared to the competition. I use OneDrive and have experienced similar issues.
The only thing I don’t like about Dropbox is their subscription plans. It’s a bit like Apple’s iPhone storage upgrades. Give you enough storage to store 3 photos for free, and charge you a bunch of money for too much storage. Yeah I know the 16GB storage is paid for in the iPhone price but you see what I mean.
Dropbox thinks it can make people upgrade to the 1TB plan by saying ‘you can stora a quadrillion hours of video with this plan’. Sadly for them, most people have an IQ level of +1 so people know it isn’t an interesting option.
I personally use OneDrive. I got 1TB along with the 4 year Office subscription I purchased for 80€. Order the 1TB Dropbox plan for 4 years and you’re out 400€ (4×100€/year) and you don’t even have Office…
When was the last time you checked Apple iCloud storage prices? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201238
Tell me how many storage plans Apple offers? People who want just a couple of GB will either go for the free version or the 50GB version, costing 1$ a month. If you want the same amount of storage on Dropbox, you’re going to have to pay 10$ a month.
If you’re someone who knows you’ll need 1TB of storage, then yes, both Apple and Dropbox are the same price. But if you want/need less, Dropbox is a terrible option.
And again, I use OneDrive because I got 1TB for 4 years for free really…
I have to respectfully disagree. I’ve been a Dropbox customer for a couple years now and I don’t think the pricing scheme is in anyway unfair or unrealistic. $10 a month gets me 1TB of space. I do have OneDrive but I prefer Dropbox’s feature set and aesthetics.
Although I’ve considered moving all of my files to OneDrive and cut back on my monthly expenditures seeing Project Infinite assures me that I choose the right cloud-based repository to stick with.
I recently read an article on Money.com that suggested that Apple buy out Dropbox. After seeing this I think they should pull the trigger. This would allow Apple to continue making/selling 16GB iPhones by allowing storage of all photos, videos and possibly even app data to remain in the cloud until called upon.
I agree Dropbox offers some great features, but other cloud services are quickly catching up. And if I wasn’t clear, what I meant is that 10$ for 1TB isn’t expensive, but most people use a couple of GB’s and not 500GB or a terabyte. And because the 1TB plan is the only one, it is expensive for those who don’t need all that storage. And Dropbox knows this. They would never have made this offer if the average amount of data per user was at 500GB/month, it would cost them too much money as they would have to build new data centers. Dropbox knows that most people store a couple of GB of data on the cloud and not hundreds.
So Dropbox pushes you to the only option, the 1TB one for 10$ a month.
Excuse me? Apple buying some cloud company would justify the existence of the 16GB iPhone? Since when is cellular data free and available in every place you go? I personally have 4GB/month and all I use it for is the Eurosport app, a news app, Safari browsing and a couple of fitness tracking apps. I never end the month with a byte left of my data plan. And I haven’t even downloaded anything from the cloud which I wished to view on my device…
Sorry if I’m being rude but that is a load of bull. You could see it off Schiller’s face when he responded the same way last year when he was asked why the entry model iPhone still offers just 16GB of storage.
Continue making 16GB iphones? Why don’t we go back to the dark ages and all use 1.44MB floppy disks? 32GB is really just giving their customers the convenience of not having to constantly back up and delete stuff, not because people are dying to use their iphones as their primary media storage solution.
Saying most other people only have an IQ level of +1 was unnecessary. They may not be fully computer literate, but I bet many people know many things that you do not.
1, you get what you pay for, Google Drive is unreliable. 2, The way MSFT just abandons services whenever they feel like it, I would not trust them as a reliable service. 3, my data is well worth the $10 a month. Everyone wants free service with paid like features. Ehhh…….
I would love to be able to use Dropbox, but as already mentioned by some here, their plan sucks and i reject to support such practices like: All or nothing . . .
Therefore, i decided to go for Google Drive, even though i would rather go with Dropbox . . .
Can we please get this with Google Drive already? From the Google Drive app.
I wish iCloud Drive had something like this, or at the very least, selective sync! Then I could actually easily use the hundreds of GB’s of extra storage space that I have as a result of Apple’s tiers and my large photo library…
Now we’re talking!
Hopefuly, iCloud Drive will evolve in the same way. Would be nice to have an iCloud Pro too, lots of cloud storage for groups, like a company or things like that. Given that is really secure of course.
I too would like to see iCloud evolve but would really like it to have Time Machine integration so I could delete stuff locally and be able to recover stuff as and when required.
YES. Being able to back up to iCloud would be great. But if not TimeMachine, does anyone know of another backup solution that will save to the cloud?
Interesting. I hope they don’t restrict it to business subscriptions because this would be really useful for keeping photos available while not filling up my Air’s small SSD.
What I wonder is how file removal will be handled. Like if you can set a target local storage space size and have it auto-remove files on a lest-recently-used basis. That would be great.
I also wonder how this would work with something like iPhoto for Mac. If I have all my photos in Dropbox then add them to iPhoto as references that could actually work better than using it with Apple’s no-control-at-all iCloud Photo Library.
1) I had forgotten how atrocious Windows looks.
2) The most fundamentally important thing in creating a video, is audio. This video was truly unbearable to watch, with this narrator.
3) People thinking the 16GB iPhone has no place in todays world need to get their head out of the sand and stick it in the wind. Understand why the phone exists, and embrace it. Instead of repeating the same bilious and declamatory posts, only to show their derisory IQ.
It exists to lower the widely-advertised price of the device to make them seem closer to price-competitive with Android devices. But since Apple slams its customers with 40% markups despite having tens of billions of dollars in cash on hand, the least it could do is stop insulting our collective intelligence and spend the extra couple of bucks to remove the constant source of aggravation that is managing local storage, and which their own cloud services do little to mitigate.
“Dropbox is today announcing…”
Is that correct english?
It would seem not, no. Just like your post has an error.
Please, for the life of me, and any other person pointing out errors, may they be typos, of a grammatical nature, or incorrect spelling: if you think something is off either keep it to yourself or mail the author of the article. There is really no point in doing this publicly: people will simply react to it with furtiveness.
Thank you.
I wasn’t trying to imply that it was incorrect. I asked if it was correct English or not because I seriously want to know. Dont assume I’m doing it in the same way a ‘Grammar Nazi’ points out spelling mistakes.
There was an app that I used all the time. i think it was called OnDrive. It allowed me to do this very same thing, but by using not just Google Drive, but other storage services too, like Google Drive, OneDrive, et al.. I used it a lot for what’s being shown here, but also for the other reason that I was able to access more than one account of the same service. I no longer use it now; you have to pay a subscription for it which I personally think it makes no sense since since they aren’t storing anything in their own servers and I can see this being open-sourced by someone.
That aside, I like that Dropbox is doing this; I no longer have to go to the website every time I need to get something from an un-synced folder (trust me: it’s more annoying than you may think).
Isn’t this what a WebDAV is?
How dies this new feature differ from Dropbox’s existing “Selective Sync” feature?
With this you will see everything you have synced, including the folders you have opted not to sync locally.
I understand what Dropbox means by “Infinite” but shouldn’t this be called Project 1TB?
What happens when you finish working on a file you just saved locally? Does it ‘go back to the cloud’ when you are done with it? Or does it stay on your hard drive? I didn’t see any way to delete a local copy but keep the file on your Dropbox.
Well done, needed SO badly. Do we know when it’ll be released?