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Re:Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone by dododo on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @01:24PM (#1653485)
lsyncd does the brunt of the work. it uses inotify, which is a facility of the linux kernel, to tell which files should be copied. but i think there is a problem.

inotify is not guaranteed to see every file system access. in fact, it often misses them when the file system is busy because there is an upper bound upon the number of inotify events that can be queued, set in /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_queued_events.

i.e., you could get data loss using this mechanism alone. you need to also run rsync every so often, i think.

the lsyncd guys are aware of this: http://code.google.com/p/lsyncd/

(maybe this is how dropbox works under linux too, if so it presumably has the same problem..)

Re:Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone by brlewis on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @04:58PM (#1654249)
I would guess Dropbox has this same problem on Linux, though I can't say with certainty. What I can say with certainty is that they're thinking about the problem.

As is often the case, you learn a lot about a company through its jobs page. Their latest challenge for applicants looks very much like this problem.

Re:Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone by noja on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @03:00PM (#1653829)
Any files not moved elsewhere within X seconds can be handled by a cleanup daemon.
Re:Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone by beza1e1 on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @02:06PM (#1653605)
Well, Ubuntu One seems to rely on checking every so often alone ...
Re:Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone by rw- on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @03:21PM (#1653910)
inotify is also unable to inherit handlers. after a "mkdir -p a/b/c/d" it is very likely that "d" is untracked. therefore lsyncd is useless on real systems. :(