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Client side encryption would stop Dropbox from deduplicating the data. Very few people rip their own CDs. Instead they buy them from a digital store or pirate t
by Danieru 14y ago
Client side encryption would stop Dropbox from deduplicating the data. Very few people rip their own CDs. Instead they buy them from a digital store or pirate them. In either case the mp3 will not be unique. If you look in the average users home directory you'll find a few megabytes of word documents, a few hundred megabytes of family photos and maybe their music collection.
If we assume that the set of files users sync is similar to the set of files in their home directory then it is not a stretch to conclude that Dropbox deals with lots of music. Dropbox cannot do anything about the documents or family photos but they can save considerable bandwidth and disk space by deduplicating the music, or any other common media.
Since dropbox's biggest input cost is storage I could well see client side encryption having a consider effect on their profitability.
- rdl 14y agoYou could construct a de-duplicated system with client side encryption by building an index pre-encryption. There is some leakage of information about what files exist, but not the contents of those files, and IMO the "files which are shared widely among Dropbox accounts" are NOT the ones people care most about keeping encrypted... There are several systems with client side encryption, some of which also have de-duplication, and at least one of which has interesting crypto (bitcasa). This is all unrelated to the authentication problem with dropbox today, though.
- MichaelGG 14y agoDue to exaggerated copyright concerns, Dropbox no longer dedupes across customers, last I checked. People were using dedupe to "instantly send" files (a project called Dropship). Dropbox felt that made them too liable for copyright infringement and nixed the feature.