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Comment by cones688 | Hacker News Reader

> Another problem with Dropbox is that upon login it indexes the entire Dropbox

I haven't used Dropbox in a while as a local client for other reasons but I think people need to appreciate this is the payoff for having the convenience? How can one expect it to sync changes if it never scans or detects changes? People seem to want a magical product where it never uses any HD throughput or CPU to index/scan/upload megabytes of data, sure it can look for changes less often but that decreases the usefulness of the product.

As a sidenote, surely all the dropboxers use dropbox for everything (they have unlimited accounts) so they must be 100% aware of this? in which case there must be concrete reasons for this!?

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I am not saying Dropbox sucks, I am just criticizing those aspects which I think could be improved and are being neglected.

From my conversations with Dropbox support I understood that Dropbox really can't handle a large number of small files. The large plans are intended for people who store large files, not lots of stuff.

Well, just my 2 cents...

The indexation doesn't need to happen immediately upon boot. Do one directory every minute or so, let the computer start up and do other things while your background task runs.

Changes are detected because the operating system notifies dropbox of changes made, they're not continuously scanning the drive. From other comments it sounds like dropbox has registered a hook like that for the entire filesystem, instead of just the working folder. That seems unnecessary.

My computer comes to a halt on boot because of the Dropbox client. I hate it. For some reason SugarSync does not do this kind of thing, so there has to be a way to do it in a smarter way.

Why can't Dropbox remember the state of the files in your dropbox folder, and upon login, grab state of the files on the Dropbox server and do a simple comparison, without re-calculating hashes for the files on your computer?

Your files may have changed between logins (multi-user system, multi-OS system, etc.).

In that case, you can look at the modified date first. Better than re-calculating hashes.

I guess the methods I propose will not guarantee proper syncing if for some reason a file has changed but the metadata hasn't...

A hashing/checksumming filesystem would make it possible to determine whether a file's contents have changed without reading the file. The burden of computing the checksum is then shifted to writing, which in theory occurs once per sync in the case of Dropbox. This burden is merely computational, rather than a complete disk I/O burden imposed by hashing the file when Dropbox restarts.

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