title: Back in iOS 6, updating an app with 10s of 1000s of local files took hours because of the sandbox transfer
body: <p>In more detail, last time I tried releasing updates of my app when it had thousands of files in local storage took hours because the iPad had to transfer the sandboxed files in the app's private directory over to the new app. The time required was proportional to the number of files, not the amount of data in the files. So as a workaround I built my app around a small number of very large database files, Core Data in some cases and sqlite databases in other cases. Unfortunately, the time required to store the data in those databases is also huge and swamps the network transfer time of the raw data.</p>
  
  <p>Now in iOS 8 is there a way to store a large tree of directories (5+ gigabytes of data) external to the app so that it doesn't have to be copied every time the app is updated?</p>