Dropbox looks to declutter your hard drive
"Project Infinite" is meant to save you hard drive space by letting you work with your online files as easily as you do files on your drive.
A new Dropbox feature is geared toward letting you store and access your online files more easily.
Dropbox wants to make sure your documents and other files don't gobble up your hard drive.
The online file-sharing service introduced a new feature Tuesday called Project Infinite. The idea behind the service is to make your online files look and feel just like those saved on your hard drive. Instead of storing all your files both locally and in the cloud, you can keep certain ones housed just online and access them via placeholders on your desktop.
Running out of disk space on personal devices can be an issue, with people downloading massive videos, images, songs and other files. That's where the cloud comes in, as services including Dropbox, Google Docs and Apple's iCloud provide ways to store and easily access files on their servers.
Project Infinite will give you a choice of where you want to store a file. You can keep it in your Dropbox storage space and on your hard drive. In that case, both versions of the file stay synced as always, so any changes made to one show up in the other.
You can also store a file just online. In that event, you can access the cloud-based file from the Windows Explorer or Mac OS X Finder file managers. You can organize and open your online files just as if they were stored locally. Dropbox tags an online file with a cloud icon so you know where it's stored. You can also view the properties of an online file, such as its size and creation date.
Project Infinite will support Windows 7 or higher and Mac OS X 10.9 or higher.
The Dropbox blog item announcing the service indicates that Project Infinite will be geared toward teams of business users. It didn't say whether the service would be available to individuals. For Dropbox itself, teams pay $15 per person per month. Individuals can use Dropbox for free or pay $9.99 a month for the Pro version. Dropbox also didn't specify when Project Infinite will be widely available. It said only that the feature is "already deployed with a select number of sponsor customers."
"With regards to how it will be delivered and to which account types, we are not sharing information on pricing and packaging at this time," a Dropbox spokesman said. "That said, we see lots of potential use cases for the technology."