5 ms·
Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow
by gajjanag 5y ago
Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow down sync to a crawl and spin CPU at 100%.
Concretely, I had a certain folder with 100,000+ small files for some research I was doing with a collaborator. It took my laptop 24 hours to sync this folder, and throughout my CPU was at 100% throughout. For comparison, rsync got the same job done in a few minutes. See https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file-storage-limit https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file... , the above terrible experience is in line with this caveat.
- manigandham 5y agoSure, but Rsync and Dropbox are very different. There's really no software option that handles that many small files well with the same features (realtime sync, folder moves, binary diffs, file history, etc). Rsync is great for taking a snapshot and replicating it elsewhere, which is probably a better fit for research projects anyway.
- SahAssar 5y agoSounds to me like git has basically all those features (although you need to have plugins for the binary diffs and realtime would require frequent pull/push/rebase).
- nyanpasu64 5y agoBoth the official Dropbox client and Maestral take hours at high CPU usage to complete an initial sync of my 7 gigabyte Dropbox with 30 thousand files. Maybe sync is hard, maybe Dropbox's data representation is inefficient, maybe it's because both are written in Python, an inefficient language.