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A comment on Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery. Parent comment

Re:Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery by mikevm on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @07:21AM (#5983759)
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?

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Re:Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery by nitrogen on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @07:35AM (#5983822)
Your files may have changed between logins (multi-user system, multi-OS system, etc.).
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Re:Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery by mikevm on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @09:42AM (#5984407)
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...

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Re:Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery by nitrogen on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @07:15PM (#5988114)
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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