[arondeparon]

What surprises me most is the fact that there seems to be very little interest in meta syncing. I have far more files to store than there is capacity on my SSD, and yet, most of the cloud storage providers seem to offer only full or selective sync capabilities.

What I would like to have is the ability to browse my entire file repository and "pin" certain files to make sure I can have the most critical stuff offline, while other files would be streamed when I need them.

I kind of hoped that SpaceMonkey (now Vivint Smart Drive) would be the answer for me and have one sitting right here. It's a a pretty cool device in theory, but in practice, it is extremely slow, backed by a company that could not care less about the product it has acquired.

Then there is Dropbox Smart Sync. This seems promising, but only is available for business users. I don't have any experiences with it.

Still looking for one single product to this right. Am I the only one frustrated with this?

[nkkollaw]

Same here.

iCloud comes very close, but it's horribly unreliable, and there is no way to keep it from delete certain files you might still be working with.

I had gigabytes to spare, and it deleted a pretty big file while I had it open in Photoshop, I couldn't figure out why Photoshop wouldn't save it, and it was because iCloud had deleted it while I was using it.

Now, it's been stuck at uploading 200 files/200 for about a week.

[dkonofalski]

How did that even happen? Had you not saved the file recently? iCloud chooses what to delete based on size and last access. If you were working on the file and had saved it at least once, it would be impossible for it to delete it.

[simonh]

Opening the file at all should update the 'last accessed' time, no save required.

[ortusdux]

Google photos on android does this to some degree. It suggests cleaning up space by deleting all backed up photos. You can pin photos to keep them on the phone.

I got an S8 in April and between 4k video and shooting in raw I was able to hit 40 gigs a few weeks ago. It is nice to be able to have it all stored off the phone at full rez.

I did have one issue over the 4th. I visited family who did not have wifi and had a heated ceiling which consisted of a few thousand feet of copper cabling. We were 2000ft from a 4g tower but the wires made a decent faraday cage so I had to go outside to show them family photos. I doubt anyone will have the same issue but it did show me what the photos app would feel like without cell data.

[nyreed]

I think Microsoft rolled this out as standard for OneDrive in a version of Windows (8? 8.1?), only to revert the change due to customer confusion.

[alexvy86]

It's supposed to come back (improved) with the Fall Creators Update though. I can see how many users would get confused by it but hopefully this time it'll be more intuitive.

[yohui]

They're bringing it back: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/onedr...

[rishsharma]

Look into Drive File Stream.

[arondeparon]

Looks interesting! Any pointers on how one could actually get it though? :)

At this moment it seems only available for business users who opt in for the early adopter program.

Source: https://gsuite.google.com/campaigns/index__drive-fs-eap.html

[brazzledazzle]

From the sound of it they're only going to make it available to business/enterprise customers. Ouch. Happy about it for my gsuite account but not so much for my personal account.

[dkonofalski]

iCloud does this and, in my experience, it's been pretty good about it. I have yet to run into a file that I needed that wasn't already downloaded locally. Since it uses files based on timestamps, it does it reliably. The only thing it's missing is the ability to lock a file so that it's always available, regardless of last access time/date.

[arondeparon]

Does it have the ability to 'unsync' a file? IE: if a large file is on iCloud drive, will I be able to remove it from my local disk?

[icebraining]

git-annex ftw. All files are visible, and you can selectively "get" them from a remote node (including cloud storage), and then drop them from local storage when you're done. There's no file streaming, though, you have to download them upfront.

[rbrcurtis]

Best I have figured out so far is owncloud plus resilio sync pro and then host it yourself. The former gives you Dropbox UI and apps and the latter gives you meta sync wherever you need it.