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A comment on Dropbox, why it rox and how I (and others) use it.. Parent comment

Re:Dropbox, why it rox and how I (and others) use it. by huhtenberg on Saturday December 13, 2008 @04:56PM (#396993)
If I understand it correctly the Dropbox is an application-level file-monitoring thingy. It is not a filesystem-level real-time backup software, which is something that is substantially more complex to implement.
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Re:Dropbox, why it rox and how I (and others) use it. by jwilliams on Saturday December 13, 2008 @07:14PM (#397096)
Could you elaborate more on this? What triggers the sync in the application-level example?
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Re:Dropbox, why it rox and how I (and others) use it. by huhtenberg on Saturday December 13, 2008 @11:45PM (#397223)
An OS notification does. The app subscribes to the directory content changes and the OS dispatches a notification (in whatever form) when the change happens.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365261.aspx for example.

Another option, of course, is a periodic explicit directory scan, but that's quite lame.

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