Dropbox has introduced a new Project infinite which will change the way you use cloud storage. And surprisingly this feature seems way too inspired by Microsoft’s OneDrive.
The main problem of accessing cloud storage from your local drive is that, you literally have to store the entire data on your drive, which completely defeats the purpose of cloud storage. Users do not just store data on the cloud because they want to access it from everywhere, they also store the data on cloud because their local hard drive space is less.
To avoid downloading all the data stored on the cloud to the local drive, users would traditionally have to go to Dropbox’s website or app to access their data, which many found annoying. Dropbox understood the problem and they are ready to change that.
Dropbox’s Project Infinite has introduced placeholders
In the Dropbox Open Conference held in London, the company announced Project Infinite which will give business users access to their data no matter where they are. This means that whenever users access Dropbox from their local drive, they will have access to all their uploaded files without saving them on the local drive.
This new feature is a lot like selective sync through which the users could define which folders need to be synced with the local drive and which needn’t. But the main difference between selective sync and Project Infinite is that the latter will give a better visibility and users will be able to see all the files and the folders on the Dropbox cloud.
If there are some files that the users think should be locally available, then they can be selected with a green check mark, other files would only be downloaded from the Dropbox server when they are needed by the user, thus saving the local storage space.
The Project Infinite does not look as vast as it sounds, but it does sound convincing for now. It seems like it’s specially made for users who have a lot of data stored on the cloud and they do not want to fill their local drive with it.
At the conference, the company only gave a preview of this new feature with no estimated date. There is also no confirmation if the feature would only be available for the business users or all the users.
The new feature on Dropbox seems to be inspired by OneDrive
When OneDrive had just been introduced on the new Windows 8, it had an exactly similar placeholder feature which the users really liked. But for some reason, Microsoft decided to dump that feature when OneDrive for Windows 10 was introduced.
But now that Dropbox has introduced this feature too, it will be interesting to see if OneDrive will bring the feature back.
