Dropbox’s Smart Sync lets users open a file stored only in the cloud like normal | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox’s Smart Sync lets users open a file stored only in the cloud like normal

techcrunch.com

127 pointshoov69 comments

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?

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

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.

Agreed. If anything, it should Pro first since individuals are more likely to accept the unpolished nature of new features.

Another point - even if you want to consider yourself a business ( 10$ instead of $8.25 at this stage why not ), the business plan starts at minimum 5 users ( you can use less user, but you are still charged for 5 ) FYI if you are ever tempted to try this free 30 days upgrade of your pro account that is always 1 click away.

The same goes for their OCR full-text search which (I think) is only available to business customers (and not „regular“ paying customers).

EDIT: source (at the very bottom) https://www.dropbox.com/help/9244

i am a regular customer who just uses Dropbox free without paying to any individual or business plan and I could access Paper. So yes you should be able to access.

This is not about Paper.

oops. looks like added to the wrong article.

They have had Selective Sync on desktop for a while for Pro non business users. I've been using it for at least 6 months. Let's you pick folders to not load locally. BUT it isn't the same as this new feature, just close.

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

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.

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

You can fix that with a trivial symlink.

can you not just mount --bind as needed?

    mkdir ~/keybase && sudo mount --bind /keybase ~/keybase

puts it in my homedirectory.

> 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.

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?

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

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.

This particular class of "solution" has existed at the enterprise level forever: it's called Hierarchical Storage Management.

Windows even has a built-in overlay icon for an "offline file"--i.e., a file that exists within an HSM storage hierarchy, where the only copy of the data is currently in a lower part of the hierarchy (e.g. on a tape), and accessing it will trigger a delayed retrieval.

Of course, your own computer probably doesn't have any "HSM storage hierarchies", so even on an enterprise workstation, your local files will likely never show that overlay. Instead, it's more a thing you'll see if you have a home dir stored on a SAN, consumed by your workstation over SMB. In that sense, it's sort of a feature in the same group as "quota management."

Then again, it's not like you'd never run into it outside of an enterprise context; if you downloaded an AWS S3 filesystem driver for Windows, for example, the proper indicator for "this file exists only in Glacier" would be that same overlay, because S3's use of Glacier is also Hierarchical Storage Management.

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!

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.

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".

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

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

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.

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

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)

Fellow BTSync (now Resilio Sync) user. Lately, even its mobile clients feel superior to Dropbox. I have a "master" computer that has everything synced to it, then use backblaze to back up everything offsite (it stores historical files/edits as well). I'm 100% satisfied.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

OneDrive used to have "placeholder files" (online-only, downloaded on demand), but it was removed due to poor UX.

https://blogs.office.com/2015/01/07/taking-the-next-step-in-...

Sounds like the feature could be coming back to Win10 relatively soon:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3124429/data-center-cloud/one...

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

iCloud supports Windows, at least:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

But muh Windows

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

Wonder how this compares to NFS/pNFS.

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.

Is that substantially different somehow?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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”.

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.

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

This sounds like NFS for the .js age

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

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.

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.

UX has to deal with real-life and technological limitations

That's the main problem in this case. And NFS. And CIFS. And in other similar things

NFS never did selective local and offline syncing. If you are going to compare it to anything, compare it to AFS.

what about AFS or Coda?

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

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...).

Still no .ignore list :(

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com