Dropbox has finally added the placeholders feature, one that was often requested by users, particularly those who had shifted from other cloud storage services like OneDrive which offered this feature. The feature comes as part of Dropbox’s Project Infinite which is aimed at reimagining how people find, access, and collaborate with large amounts of data stored in the cloud.
We can get terabytes and terabytes of cloud storage data if we’re willing to pay for it but rarely do we have that kind of local storage on our notebooks. This makes it impossible to sync with everything we’ve got stored in the cloud and makes it hard to collaborate with a team without running into storage issues for large files.
Project Infinite uses placeholders to make it all very simple. Dropbox will show everything that users have stored in their cloud storage, all of the files and the folders, on their computer by simply using placeholders. These aren’t the actual files, they’re essentially linked to the file because double-clicking on a placeholder will open the relevant file.
Users will be able to view all of the files and folders they have stored in Dropbox without having to download all of them. This makes it easier to collaborate with teams and sort through large amounts of data without having to download a lot of it at first, or having to sort through all of it in a clunky browser interface. Users can then manually select files and folders to sync them to their PC.
Placeholders don’t take up a lot of space on the computer, Dropbox says that 10TB worth of placeholders only take up 28MB of local storage, which is a very small price to pay for the convenience this feature brings. Project Infinite is currently being tested and will soon be available to all Dropbox users.
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