Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by gnud on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @03:54AM (#9136734)

I just had a quick look at dropbox with ProcMon, and I learned that

  1) when I created a new text file on my desktop, it was not read by Dropbox
  2) when I created a new text file in my dropbox folder, it was immideately read by Dropbox
  3) I have to find some sync tool that doesn't feel the need to enumerate my network interfaces 3 times every second, when nothing is actually changing.

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by gnud on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @03:58AM (#9136745)

Just some more information: Dropbox does not read the file outside the dropbox folder. It does, however, 'QueryBasicFileInformation' and and 'QueryDirectory' when I create a file on my desktop.

I'm guessing this has to do with the explorer extension.

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by pudquick on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:04AM (#9136770)

This is the first comment in this discussion I've seen that is actually interesting and might provide an explanation.

The Dropbox file status symbols are a -big hack-. Up until OS X 10.10, for instance, the file browsing interface didn't provide per-file badging at the OS API level. So they literally had to patch the running Finder process to do this.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn something similar is going on with Windows Explorer.

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by ryanackley on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @08:10AM (#9137455)

No, Windows provides a well-documented way to customize folder and file icons inside Windows Explorer (their equivalent of Finder).

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by nodata on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @05:29AM (#9137015)

They were patching the running Finder process? wtf?

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by cpach on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @06:23AM (#9137126)

See this blog post from 2011: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2011/03/22/disabling-dropboxs-haxie/

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by mrpopo on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @06:52AM (#9137206)

I know my company has had many problems that were pinned down to Dropbox hooking some Win32 API functions that we use. I am not familiar with the semantics of hooking, but could it be related to that?

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by neckro23 on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @09:20AM (#9137726)

Windows has a standard way of doing this, no? I've seen other Windows apps like TortoiseSvn do icon overlays too.

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by hvm on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:01AM (#9136755)

Have you heard/tried Bittorrent sync? It's P2P, doesn't put your files on their server. Very fast for transferring locally between your phone and computer for example. You have to keep your computer running if you want your files accesible anytime though.

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by jablan on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:42AM (#9136878)

Unfortunately btsync is very much not open-source. There are alternatives, though. I am very satisfied with syncthing[1], although it didn't have usable mobile app last time I checked.

[1] http://syncthing.net/

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by danieldk on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:47AM (#9136892)

And requires port forwarding, which may not be an option for people who are not on IPv4 at home (e.g. my ISP uses DS-Lite, so I cannot use IPv4 port forwarding).

Bittorrent Sync works pretty good. Somebody should reverse engineer the protocol and make an open source client.

Edit: why the heck is the grandparent downvoted? He/she offers a good suggestion.

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by benwaffle on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @08:56AM (#9137610)

or ownCloud

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by jugbee on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:22AM (#9136830)

thanks, but no. http://www.cso.com.au/article/560026/bittorrent-dismisses-se...

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by aw3c2 on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:59AM (#9136944)

Did you even read through the whole article?

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