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How Dropbox is printing money
- dave1619 16y agoIs this what Dropbox is doing? Storing just one copy of each unique file? It would make sense for large files.
- marcamillion 16y agoWell...I am not 100% sure, but that's the only logical thing given that if you tried that example I gave you with the 241MB file, it uploaded in a minute or two. This is just me putting 2 and 2 together. If they aren't, they should be :)
- taylorbuley 16y agoTo me the post seems to state the facts with such certitude that you might want to put that disclaimer a bit higher.
- marcamillion 16y agoVery true. Done!
- jolan 16y agoI am 100% sure. Pirated MP3s "upload" in seconds and my self-ripped music takes the regular amount of time.
- marcamillion 16y agoAgreed! But didn't want to include that in the post, lest the RIAA and MPAA start breathing down their throats.
- Semiapies 16y agoI seem to recall that this is how Gmail handles attachments.
- marcamillion 16y agoI know...the main differences though are that Gmail doesn't charge per attachment. Whereas Dropbox does.
- Semiapies 16y ago...And? What does that sort of entitled whining have to do with the storage methodology? Also, neither Dropbox nor Gmail have ever charged me a cent.
- jwhitlark 16y agoWell, not a single copy. They would want some sort of redundancy, even if the are just reselling aws services.
- rst 16y agoThe reference to rsync in Dropbox's YCombinator application is a bit of a tipoff --- rsync uses exactly this technique to avoid recopying files that already exist at the destination.
- marcamillion 16y agoYep...I never dived much into that reason - but that's why I quoted it and quoted the definition of 'Diff'. I guess I never brought it home as coherently as I wanted to.
- jrnkntl 16y agoI thought this was common knowledge. It wouldn't make sense to store Pirated.Movie.DVDRiP.avi thousands of times if it's the same file for thousands of users. Files that translate to the same hash, get served from one single file on DB's servers.
- marcamillion 16y agoWell perhaps the technology was common knowledge, but the business model behind it - I don't think was ever popularly discussed. It must have been overlooked. If it is true that this is what they are doing, then Dropbox has literally discovered one of the most profitable business models ever!
- jwhitlark 16y agoIt's a pretty common optimization. They had a good plan, and executed well, but let's not get carried away; other people were working on similar ideas. I'd bet that data stored in s3 are deduplicated in a similar manner. Another plus to their setup is the hash for the file is calculated on your machine, so you pay them so you can calculate the hash on your own files and only upload them if they haven't seen them before.
- marcamillion 16y agoI am sure other people were working on similar things, but how many of them were able to execute on them as well as Dropbox has? Google has supposedly implemented something like that for Gmail Attachments, but Dropbox seems to have the complete package.
- jolan 16y agoUnfortunatley, they also waste money on bandwidth. Here's the scenario: 1) Copy file into Dropbox on Server1 2) Client1 & Client2 on the same LAN will start downloading the file from the Dropbox servers at the same time; wasting their bandwidth and mine. I wish the LAN sync feature would be expanded for downloads.
- marcamillion 16y agoWell..considering the alternative, that's the least. The alternative being that they store every file X number of times, where X is the number of users that upload that file. Wasting money on bandwidth by doing multiple transfers is minimal in comparison.