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Recently, I've gone through techcrunch article where it says, Dropbox is working in Project Infinite technology which allows to load cloud content in local PC without actually storing in memory/drive

Today at the Dropbox Open conference in London, the company announced Project Infinite with the goal of giving business customers local access to files no matter where they live — in the cloud, on network drives or local drives. In practice, this means when you open Windows Explorer or OSX Finder, you will have access to all of your Dropbox files without having to store them on your drive.

Tecnically, I am confused with the approach, Dropbox would probably going to implement. Can any content in local PC be loaded without keeping in memory? If you have any experience with such technology, it would be great to know.

Akash KC
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The article doesn't speak of memory, at lest not from RAM.

Currently, when you use dropbox, the service synchronizes data between the cloud and your PC hard drive. So when you access your dropbox file, you access in reality a local cloned copy of it.

The Project infinite seems to implement a real network drive access without keeping local copy of the file. So for every read/write, instead of sending request to the hard disk driver, it will transfer the request to a cloud proxy that emulates the behaviour of a disk (at least that is what I understand here).

About experience with the technology, 20 years ago already, we used NFS-Network file system to access to remote disks via a TCP/IP network via 10Mb/s ethernet. Nowadays, when you access remote disks using windows or a NAS server, you also use similar techniques without noticing.

The main difference is that these technologies are based on local networks. Dropbox will have to cope with a higher scale with huge amount of simultaneous requests, certainly using distributed cache servers.

And contrary to today, it would be possible to really work simultaneously on the same file.

Christophe
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  • Will it be possible without loading in memory so far with existing technology? If it works like with streaming apporach, it seems to be quite feasible but without using local PC memory, I don't think it can be done. Am I right? – Akash KC May 06 '16 at 21:17
  • Yes you're right. Whether streaming or project infinite, there is no magic: the data has to traverse the memory to be processes by your processor. The only thing you can avoid is to have a local copy on the disk. – Christophe May 06 '16 at 21:19