Technology is disclosed herein for a cloud based file system that can surpass physical storage limit. According to at least one embodiment, a computing device includes a file system having multiple storage objects. The metadata of the storage objects are stored in local storage of the computing device. A remote storage server is responsible for storing the content data of the storage objects. The computing device presents the storage objects via an output device as if the content data are stored locally in the computing device. The computing device identifies some of the storage objects that have a high possibility to be read by computer applications of the computing device, and caches the content data of these storage objects locally.