The Dropbox terabyte conundrum
sixcolors.com
sixcolors.com
http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive
Mount Dropbox as a network drive. Smart local cache. Access the data on demand without syncing the repo in first. Also supports gdrive, s3, sftp, onedrive, box and more.
Makes a 1TB account make a lot more sense if you only have a 128GB SSD. Use selective sync with the primary client to only sync a portion of your Dropbox. Then use ExpanDrive to offload the rest and access it as needed.
1. He said product, so it's probly not free. I wonder how much it costs?
2. Scrolls through the whole page I don't see a breakdown of price. Hmmmm
3. ctrl-f "$" Ahh, I see it says upgrade pricing is $24.99. Wait, does it cost that much, or is that a special "upgrade only" price?
4. looks around on the page more Ahhh, there's a store link, I hope it lists the price there!
5. Ok, so the price is $50 for a single-user license. Why was that so hard to find?
I don't mean to be rude with these remarks; your product seems perfectly relevant and it's awesome if it works as you say. But as a customer, I found that a bit confusing and I thought you as the business owner may want some feedback about one particular users experience.
A random example: The people who don't download your software because they can't find the price might think very negatively about your product.
If that doesn't hurt your profit, shouldn't you still do it?
Please take this as a compliment, but I didn't realize you needed to "plug" ExpanDrive. I sort of assumed that it was produced by a large company. Anyway, thank you for a wonderful piece of software, and for continually developing it.
Is Yosemite currently supported? Would it make sense to support iCloud Drive too?
The issue is that products like ExpanDrive make all online storage drives to which you have to copy first, and upstream is still relatively slow even in countries with cheap high bandwidth downstream. It's still just FTP with a nicely integrated interface.
The ideal would be something that keeps the files locally until they have been synced in the background, and then removes the local copies whilst still allowing you to access them in the same way as if they were local copies. I.e., placing them in your cloud drive is instant, even though it actually takes a while for them to be transferred.
No, that's not an easy problem to solve, but anyone who does solve it will get my money.
(Really awesome would be if it intelligently kept local copies available based on usage and available space. The bottom line is: not having to consciously worry about where to put the files.)
+ Any plans for an iOS version?
iOS version is almost done. Tried to get it out for iOS 8 launch, but didn't quite get there.
spacemonkey was designed from the beginning to handle storing much more data than you'd ever be able to store on your laptop hard drive. The way it does this is it actually mounts itself as a FUSE filesystem and keeps it's own LRU cache of your spacemonkey data on the drive. If you access a recently created or accessed file it will just load from the disk cache. If it detects that you are running out of hard drive space it will automatically prune the stuff that hasn't been accessed in a while (so spacemonkey never causes you to have an "Out of disk space" error). you still see it though, it tells you its size, metadata etc. and if you try to open one of those files it will grab it from the network transparently behind the scene for you it just might add a little bit of latency (as if you were accessing something on a network share).
In 2014 you should not have to be thinking about what to "selectively sync" the service you use should just figure it out for you (and let you customize it if you need to)
disclamer: I used to work for spacemonkey but do not any more, although I think they make a great product and are a super smart team.
It's like I need a ~/Dropbox and a ~/DropboxCloud where the ~/DropboxCloud is just virtual, not real disk space on my HDD.
Unfortunately it looks like they've changed focus to the enterprise.
I actually think iTunes Match does a good job of solving this problem, on a media storage basis. I have my whole library "uploaded" to iTunes, but then I can selectively download and listen to songs on any device when I need them, even to my 8GB phone. Now my music library doesn't clog up my computer or phone or tablet, etc.
If dropbox found a similar model, I would sign up for that in an instant.
It sounds like you want my PhD thesis project.
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)), 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.
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.
My Macbook Air is the only computer I use, both at home and at work. Its SSD is 60 GB. Last month, Dropbox upgraded my account (for free) up to 1 TB.
Selective Sync? It's not optimal. We use several shared folders at work. Some of them become rapidly heavy without me noticing, unless I sense my laptop slowing down and find the culprit folder (with Diskwave) and unselect it from my sync. Plus: any (non-empty) shared folder you join will automatically sync on all your devices. It should be opt-in, not opt-out.
Offloading massive files? I use the (very good) web interface. It's a two-step process though: upload via the browser, and then delete your file. It's usually a one-off event, but is not what Dropbox is usually about: being seamless. Remember Doug's pitch to YC? The level of abstraction where you just hit "Save" and you're done? That's what's still missing with one-way transfers to the cloud.
Most of the hard drives installed in new computers these days are less than 2TB, and less than 1TB on laptops (which are very popular).
At the moment Dropbox has only a (free) plan of 2GB and another of 1TB. I think this is something that needs to be managed by Dropbox, if they want users to be happy.
Unfortunately as nice as this sounds in practice its extremely slow (at least for us in Europe).
I am facing the same problem with hubiC which has a 10GB plan only and unless you have some crazy raid configuration on your desktop there is no way you can fill it up unless you use the web interface exclusively.
I hoped iCloud Drive would solve this: iCloud Drive supports similar capacities, but obviously iPhones can't store the whole Drive so presumably it's been designed with this in mind, but it seems like the OS X version still syncs the entire thing (at least I haven't been able to find any information to the contrary).
1. It's a good thing for the many people who DO have more space on their computer.
2. It's a good thing because it leaves room for growth.
3. It's a good thing because it makes the service more useful for power users.
hit "Save" and you're done? Newsflash: it STILL works that way!!
It is true that in some cases they may not have realized they had this desire until ExpanDrive gave them enough storage to think about it, but they do now.
It's pretty transparent and intuitive. I would think this could be done on desktop / laptop systems, maybe via an optional client, with all files set initially to a no-sync value.
Just so you know.
I use a MacBook Air with only 128GB of storage. I use "selective syncing" to not keep most of my Dropbox files on my laptop.
If I need anything not synced to my laptop, then I choose it to be synced, wait a short while, and then it is available locally.
Dropbox has a really good Linux CLI client so I'm sure there are people who will manage to bump up against that limit.
> Right now the only way to do that would be to put something in the box, then turn off Selective Sync everywhere for that folder. (Or upload files via Dropbox’s web interface, to a folder that’s been unchecked on all your devices via Selective Sync.)
> It’s not ideal. Selective Sync wasn’t meant to be used in that way… but for that matter, neither was Dropbox.
I think his gripe is the core premise of dropbox — file syncing — isn't the same as 1TB backup.
That's why my old startup offered FTP with no frills: it just works.
Totally agree though. I'm not going to pay for a TB of storage until I can moves files I don't need on my SSD anymore (ie RAW photos I've developed) into Dropbox and have them removed from my computer seamlessly.
Sooooo easy to implement, just upload the file. When it's done, run an md5 on the local and the cloud, if same then delete local.
Best part of it is that UI changes done on one system remain consistent when using other machines. Completely took the pain out of a format/reinstall, too.
Trying to constrain Home to my Dropbox folder also reawakened an old skill: Space discipline. With drive space exploding and SSDs still being relatively constrained, I had forgotten how much crap I tended to hoard and not sort through until I was feeling pinched again thanks to my Dropbox quota.
Each of my machines is configured (almost) exactly the same, and all the media/projects/work is available on all my computers at the same time.
I also experience the forced "space discipline" and would add that I also have to have a better organizational structure in general. I'm constantly "re-balancing the tree" that is my directory structure, re-defining and re-grouping my media into ever finer groups in an effort to stop things from accumulating in digital "junk drawers".
On a different note, I disagree with the suggestion of having a "virtual filesystem" that is the entire Dropbox service. I feel that doesn't fit with what Dropbox is: a folder that syncs. I don't want to have to worry about the physical location of my files, which I most definitely would have to do based on my internet speed (which is as good as it can get right now).
That said, don't put your irc client in there... I wind up forgetting it's connected when I leave work only to get tons of notifications at home...
I also have Time Machine backups of both systems.
And, no, I don't want to run and manage a local "LAN Dropbox clone". It's all about the integration with different mobile and desktop apps and services, the remote backup, and that you don't have to manage it.
get a computer with actual expandable storage