At Box, our goal is to empower customers to securely collaborate on their content with AI.
With hundreds of millions of files uploaded daily, including tens of millions of new versions from editing and collaboration, content velocity continues to accelerate. More content, more collaborations, and more agentic workflows enter the picture year over year.
We’re constantly looking for ways to deliver the best performance at the increasing scale that agents bring. To meet these demands and make important collaborative experiences faster for our customers, Box has some exciting enhancements to share.
Faster version uploads are here
We’re releasing faster version uploads to Box Drive, available to all clients from v2.53 onwards.
Capitalizing on a new backend capability that allows clients to avoid re-uploading duplicate chunks to Box, this feature brings both performance and bandwidth improvements for uploads. Benefitsincrease in tandem with the numbers of duplicated chunks:Larger file sizes and more duplicate chunks result in greater throughput increases.
In cases where a file is updated through many iterations, whether by a user or tweaked continuously by agents, the benefits are magnified even more.
Only relevant chunks retrieved
Previously, when a user or agent finished editing, Box Drive clients would re-upload a file in full to sync it with Box.
This becomes a bottleneck for cases where a user might have only made a quick edit, like changing a line of text. While only a small portion of the file was changed, the entirety of the file got re-uploaded, wasting time and bandwidth. File uploads are now streamlined by skipping chunks that are already present — where no changes have occurred.
What’s changed
Typically, when a file is updated, it gets chunked. Those chunks get sent back up to the server.
With our new capability, the server sifts through the chunks and distinguishes those that have already been uploaded from those that have yet to be uploaded. The server then directs the client to reuse previously uploaded chunks for that file, while new chunks are recognized as requiringupload.
*Numbers observed can vary depending factors such as the individual network, file type being uploaded, and edits to the file.
See the upgrades in action
For users on Box Drive v2.53+, this capability is already enabled and will apply to all files >=20MBs. Uploads on those clients will utilize this capability and see all of the benefits that comes with it. Users on older versions of Box Drive are recommended to update to the latest version to utilize this and a slate of other new features.
