[johnchristopher]

> If you have to execute bulk operations, your only option is to first sync everything to a local machine, then move stuff around there (or delete it) and wait for the low performance desktop client to shovel everything back up upstream.

> It’s such a flawed design.

> One major advantage of cloud storage and selective sync is that I conveniently want to be able to re-organise files and folders through my Browser, without actually being forced to download everything first.

Hmm. The way I see it the Web UI is a bonus and a fall back when you are not near the computer where it's much easier to move files and folders around. Dropbox was sold and still sell as `files on your devices synced everywhere´ not `central mainline repo that downloads to your devices´.

I am old school, I still think that file management in the browser doesn't work well.

But I agree the desktop client (win and mac) got slower and slower (UI wise). My debian installation runs a previous version that is much faster.

I am glad they aren't packing it with new features that would disturb the dropbox mental model every layman has.

[derefr]

What I've really always wanted, and still never seen, is "Hierarchical Storage Management with the canonical copies of everything in the cloud, and a bounded-size MRU cache on all my local devices, but where updates to the cached files are taken as updates to the canonical version."

This way, you'd be able to have petabytes of stuff seemingly "synced" to your local disk; stuff would just be (much) slower to access the first time, or if you hadn't used it in a while. (Sort of like Apple's "fusion drives", but with the spinning disk very, very far away.)

It's almost like a FUSE-mounted WebDAV share or somesuch, but where you interact with it through its local cache on your real filesystem, rather than by your OS making its read/write requests to the server itself.