Dropbox Project Infinite

Dropbox have just announced an upcoming feature named Dropbox Infinite, which sounds like a great way to access shared files across a business, without needing large amounts of storage on your computer to store copies of all shared files.

Many people have used Dropbox, or a similar file sharing alternative such as Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive before. These solutions sync files from your computer to cloud storage, which makes it simple to share files or to access them from another computer. Any updates to the files sync to all other computers, making it a great way to collaborate, especially with a mobile workforce. Products such as Dropbox Business will also store previous versions of files and allow recovery of deleted files, so can be used for backups.

The problem is that if a business is storing a large amount of data in the shared folders, a copy of this data is downloaded to each computer. With limited storage on computers, particular those with smaller SSD drives, computers can quickly run out of space. 

Dropbox Infinite looks to address this by having small placeholder files appear on the computer. It's not until you access the placeholder file that a copy of the file is downloaded to your computer. This means you can still see all the files which have been shared with you, but they're not taking up space until you need them. 

Interestingly, there used to be a similar feature in Microsoft OneDrive, which was removed. Time will tell if Microsoft reintroduce this functionality.