You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Currently, if you set a file to Online Only, but occasionally need to edit/update it and have it remain Online Only, there is no option to do this. Dropbox will download the file to Local, allow the...
One of the potential (but not yet realized) benefits of Online-only storage is that truly Online-only files, delivered from the cloud only when the file icon is clicked, cannot be outdated. While conflicted copies can originate in a number of ways, we've had issues with slow syncing speeds which enable users to boot their computers, open File Explorer, open a shared file, check Badge to confirm that no other users are in the same file, edit the file, and save changes, only to learn later that someone had previously saved changes at an earlier point & the sync was too slow to reveal the updated file to the user; now there's a conflicted copy to be reconciled. My understanding is that DB has no solutions for sync lag time (beyond confirming that upload and download speeds are not limited), but making Online-only storage genuinely Online-only could be an excellent solution. Currently, when an Online-only file is opened, it converts to Local storage. This would be fine so long as the file would revert to Online-only storage once the file was closed. Instead, the file will remain Local until enough time passes without activity that DB deems it infrequently used; at which point the file will revert to Online-only. The challenge here is that frequently used files (e.g. used every day, or at least every week) will never revert back to Online-Only. For frequently used & shared files, this means that we're at the mercy of sync speeds to prevent conflicted copies.
My question is why, when DB has the ability to automatically revert files to Online-only after the passage of days or weeks, can it not automatically revert files to Online-only as soon as the file is saved & closed? Is there a concern about lag? If so, I can't say there's an identifiable difference in speed when opening a Local file vs an Online-Only file. I'd like to stay with DB, but the lack of true Online-Only storage makes migration to another platform very attractive as conflicted files can be a bear to resolve.