ADD option/preference to SAVE (i.e. not delete) automatically downloaded "Online Only" files

A simple idea for power users who need it: check a box, and all automatically downloaded "Online Only" files will automatically get converted to "Available Offline."

This new preference would enable power users to say "let me hold on to all those files dropbox downloads automatically until I decide to set them BACK to Online Only."

This is especially important for customer who do audio/video editing or something similar—where an editing application is referencing many (sometimes hundreds!) of other media files via various folders on Dropbox.

Previously, if a file or folder was set to "Online Only" and the 3rd party editing software tried to access that file, it would simply be unavailable/offline. (Most editing software would notify the user, giving the user time to find the file and it it to "offline only.") But NOW, files set to "Online Only" are automatically downloaded when the editing software tries to access them—BUT THEN they are removed/purged when the software stops accessing them for a time. This forces users to be constantly and unnecessarily re-downloading these same files—which is especially bad if they are large files.

As is, the current approach is extremely disruptive to media editing workflows.

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Status: Open

Comments

Keith

Hi @BrendanPBaker, thanks for sharing this idea.

I'd love to understand the use case a bit better. Could you explain why keeping the project files in a single subfolder directory and switching the root folder to "Make Available Offline" while you're working with them, and back to "Online Only" once finished, doesn't quite fit the workflow you have in mind?

BrendanPBaker

I appreciate the follow up. Because I understand why it seems like there's already a simple solution for this by setting the folder to "Make Available Offline." But sometimes, there's way too much data or the file/folder structure is too complex for this—and you actually still need a bunch of that data to remain "Online Only."

For example: Let's imagine you're working on a audio or video project, like a documentary, and you're collaborating with a bunch of other people on it using Dropbox. Your editing software needs to reference hundreds of media files. Because it's a documentary, you might have collected many giga or terabytes of raw footage, which you've stored and organized with a specific date/location structure in dropbox. Those are the files your editing software needs to reference—but only some of the files; it's simply not practical to set the entire raw footage archive to "Make Available Offline." That would be too much data and maybe more data than your local computer can actually use at the moment.

Instead, you and your collaborative team go through the painstaking effort to mark which specific folders are used in the documentary, and only set those to "Available Offline." So far, so good, right?

Now you start working with your collaborative team, the documentary is being edited, and you need to reference additional files and folders from your raw footage on Dropbox. One of your teammates starts adding new files to the documentary, but forgets to tell you that you need to set new folders to "Available Offline" on your computer in order for the project to load. Then YOU open the editing project on your computer, and you run into a problem.

In an older version of dropbox on MacOS — before we were switched over to Apple's CloudService-based file service—those new files would simply be "unavailable" on your computer, and your editing software would prompt you to either skip the file (make it "offline") OR you'd get a notice that there were missing files and you'd go find them and set them to "Available Offline." That was the old way and it wasn't a perfect system because it requires a lot of manual attention. But it was consistent and workable at least.

But NOW that MacOS Dropbox users are using Apple's CloudService, instead of that file being "unavailable," when you load your editing software and a file is set to "Online Only," Dropbox sees that the file is technically available and attempts to automatically download it. This seems like it would be good feature—and it could be—but when the files are many gigabytes large, this means your editing software is stuck waiting for these files to download. (Which appears as if the software is frozen or hung up—beachballing.)

Eventually, if you are patient, the files will download. Great! Now you can finally do your work. So you do your work. Then you save and close the program. But unbeknownst to you, those files you just downloaded may now be purged, and no longer available locally on the computer. So the next day you start editing and have to re-download all those files all over again. And worst still, because this is all happening automatically, it's actually MUCH more difficult to manually figure out which of the many hundreds of raw files on Dropbox are they ones you need to set to "Available offline" to avoid having to re-download them each time you sit down to do work.

So. Here's the pitch: give us a setting that would let us HOLD ONTO any of the previous "Online Only" files that were automatically downloaded and automatically set those auto-downloaded files to "Available Offline." Or, if you want to think about it another way, this optional setting or preference would prevent purging these downloaded files, hard drive space allowing.

This feature would be saving me so much time and grief right now if it were available.

BrendanPBaker

What's more — the new MacOS version of Dropbox no longer indicated WHICH files are being synched in from the Menu Bar panel. So I'm totally in the dark about which files are the ones that would need to be set to "available offline."

This is a real problem!

Keith

Thanks @BrendanPBaker, I’ve got a much clearer picture of your workflow now.

It sounds like the main need here is either keeping automatically downloaded online-only files available offline, or giving you better visibility over recently downloaded files so managing their sync settings is a bit easier.

I’m going to open it up for Community voting so we can hear what the wider community thinks as well.