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Indeed! I was looking at using Tahoe-LAFS in a similar manner as this dropbox feature, and happened upon a lot of information about those unpleasant surprises:

Starting from https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/FAQ#Q23_FUSE with links to https://plus.sandbox.google.com/108313527900507320366/posts/... and http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/... on the subject.

One good optimization would be caching the first ~512 bytes of each file—enough to make libmagic-based programs (which includes a lot of search-indexing systems, grep's binary-file-skipping, etc.) happy. With this in place, "opaque" files that an indexer doesn't want to look into could be left in the cloud, while only the files that actually need to be content-indexed would be downloaded.

> practically it will render som unpleasant surprises.

You take for granted that Dropbox hasn't considered these issues. Why?