At Dropbox, AI-powered tools and features are quickly transforming the way our customers find, organize, and understand their data. Dropbox Dash brings AI-powered universal search to all your apps, browser tabs, and cloud docs, while Dropbox AI can summarize and answer questions about the content of your files. To meet the bandwidth requirements of new and future AI workloads?and stay committed to our sustainability goals?the Dropbox networking team recently designed and launched our first data center architecture using highly efficient, cutting edge 400 gigabit per second (400G) ethernet te ..read more

Dropbox is updating the team space functionality to improve the scalability and privacy of the team space model. Accordingly we?re introducing some new features and behaviors to the Dropbox API to make sure that apps can properly support team spaces. If your app interacts with team-owned content, read on for information on how to handle these updates in your app?s code. We?re rolling out the new team features to new and existing teams over the next few months. Customer teams will get an email notification ahead of their scheduled update date. If necessary, please update your app to support t ..read more

Dropbox offers several AI-assisted features to help users with tedious organizational tasks. In a recent story we discussed naming conventions. Here, we?ll discuss another feature, smart move, that grew from a need to help users?particularly administrators?more quickly and easily organize large numbers of files.  Released in November 2021, smart move uses machine learning to analyze a user?s existing subfolder structure and suggest folders where they might want to move their files. For example, you can drop a bunch of unorganized files into your home directory with existing folders, and ..read more

File names play a vital role in facilitating effective communication and organization among teams. Files with cryptic or nonsensical names can quickly lead to chaos?whereas a well-structured naming system can streamline workflows, improve collaboration, and ensure easy retrieval of information. Consistency in naming across different files and file types enables teams to find and share content more efficiently, saving time and reducing frustration. To make it easier for our users to organize and find their files, Dropbox has an automated feature called naming conventions. With this feature, u ..read more

If you?re using or want to use the official Dropbox Swift SDK or Dropbox Objective-C SDK, read on for information on a major SDK update we?ve released in beta. We've released a beta version of a significant update to the official Dropbox Swift SDK: SwiftyDropbox 10.0.0-beta.3 This new version has several significant improvements and features requested by the community, including: support for background sessions compatibility for Objective-C code bases native networking without an external dependency You can find more information in the beta release notes and README file. Please tr ..read more

Like many companies, Dropbox has been experimenting with large language models (LLMs) as a potential backend for product and research initiatives. As interest in leveraging LLMs has increased in recent months, the Dropbox Security team has been advising on measures to harden internal Dropbox infrastructure for secure usage in accordance with our AI principles. In particular, we?ve been working to mitigate abuse of potential LLM-powered products and features via user-controlled input. Injection attacks that manipulate inputs used in LLM queries have been one such focus for Dropbox security en ..read more

For more than a decade, Dropbox has operated its own world-class, exabyte-scale storage system?a multi-metro, hybrid-cloud architecture that spans the globe. But to get to this point, we've had to learn a lot about what makes a good data center, and how to pick the perfect site.  Early on, we leveraged industry relationships, then specialized real estate brokers. As we matured, we brought the site selection process in house. Similar to what you'd see in a construction or supply chain environment, our process mimics a competitive RFP. In more recent years, sustainability has also become ..read more

Dropbox is well known for storing users? files?but it?s equally important we can retrieve content quickly when our users need it most. For the Retrieval Experiences team, that means building a search experience that is as fast, simple, and powerful as possible. But when we conducted a research study in July 2022, one of the most common complaints was that search was still too slow. If search was faster, these users said, they would be more likely to use Dropbox on a regular basis. At that time, we found it took ~400-450ms (p75) for the search webpage to submit a query and receive a response ..read more

Dropbox employs numerous industry-standard measures to prevent our services from being used for malicious purposes. This includes working with trusted third-party vendors to help us identify viruses, malware, and phishing attempts.  One of these trusted vendors* previously helped us identify malicious URLs embedded within documents shared using Dropbox. However, we recently discovered that the URLs we submitted were made visible to our vendor?s other paid subscribers and partners. As soon as we became aware of the situation, we immediately stopped submitting URLs to the vendor and worke ..read more

How Dropbox re-wrote its core web serving stack for the next decade?sunsetting technical debt accrued over 13 years, and migrating high-traffic surfaces to a future-proofed platform ready for the company?s multi-product evolution. ~ ~ ~ In the Fall of 2021, Dropbox quietly launched an internal alpha version of our core web-based file browser. This internal alpha marked a critical milestone in Dropbox web architecture: our file browser was now a Single Page Application, or SPA. On its own, this wouldn?t have been very remarkable. SPAs have been around in concept for almost two decades, and ha ..read more