So, like NFS - what happens if your internet connection is interrupted while you're reading the file? What happens if another computer saves to the same file while you're reading it?
Dropbox has smart people and I'm sure they would have wanted a feature like this from day 1, so if they're introducing it, I'm sure they have good answers. I'm just curious what they are!
NFS will, depending on mount options, block forever or start returning errors if the connection is lost. It's not really suitable for non-LAN use for a number of reasons.
It also will let you overwrite or interleave files unless both sides use advisory locking.
Yup. We use NFS at scale at $dayjob (including across continents, which is sometimes exciting) and I'm pretty sure everyone wishes we had something with the simplicity of Dropbox.
I'm curious how Dropbox has made this safe to use for people who don't want to think about things like "close-to-open consistency" or "stale file handle".
one cool thing I've seen "Smart Sync" do...on OS X it seems to fill out the thumbnail cache for images that are "online only". This means you can see the preview for what an image looks like without forcing the client to download it.
Also local files behave exactly like other local files so in that case (the typical case) all that pain you feel with NFS/FUSE goes away
Dropbox has smart people and I'm sure they would have wanted a feature like this from day 1, so if they're introducing it, I'm sure they have good answers. I'm just curious what they are!