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I 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. F
by jrnkntl 16y ago
I 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.