Abstract: A system and a method are disclosed for receiving a file at a cloud-based storage system and storing the file in the file structure of the cloud-based storage system. Once received, the file, the name of the file, and its storage location in the cloud storage are associated with a unique identifier created for the file. The file, when provided to at least one user client, can be stored by the user client in a user-defined file structure that is different from the cloud-based storage system file structure. Because of the unique identifier associated with the file and the cloud-based storage location, the locally stored files can still be synchronized with file stored at the cloud-storage location.