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Comment by Joakal | Hacker News Reader

There's a difference between 200 million new files and 200 million 'uploaded' files.

eg a song has a fingerprint. If 100 other users 'upload' the same song, it's counted towards their usage but no actual upload or storage is performed, saving costs.

Pretty clever on their part :)

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Pretty clever on their part :)

It is actually pretty standard. Deduplication is a very common method for not duplicating the same content on shared storage.

OT: How do you add italics to text? I find it preferable than adding >s.

Put asterisks around the text: *your text (and another asterisk - can't put one or my text will be italicized!).

You may find these helpful, the formatting options for HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Yes it is very clever, I had forgotten they ensure they only store unique files (I wonder what percentage of files "saved" are unique). I actually went and looked through the TechCrunch articles from April 17th that announced the Dropbox 25m user mark and 200 million file saves but it doesn't distinguish between unique and saved files. I imagine its the latter as it would be the more impressive number.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/17/dropbox-hits-25-millions-us...

About the percentage of unique files: I guess if you go by volume, the percentage of unique files is small. And if you go by number, the percentage of unique files is big.

I.e. bigger files are more likely to be stuff that you didn't make yourself.

Until you get to home video. Which is growing very quickly.

Indeed. I wonder whether pre-fabricated files will grow in size, too, or whether the ratio will eventually shift.

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