7 ms·
The only takeaway is that his power usage shouldn't be that high with Dropbox idling/paused. But given that he's * surprised at it using a lot of power when do
by maikhoepfel 13y ago
The only takeaway is that his power usage shouldn't be that high with Dropbox idling/paused. But given that he's
* surprised at it using a lot of power when doing the initial sync
* decided to have a git repo inside Dropbox (just don't do it, you will run into trouble; and it will cause heavy sync activity, thus waking CPU and wifi)
* using a unit of capacity to express power consumption
I'm not sure I trust his methods.
I regularly turn off Dropbox on and off when switching between mobile broadband and wifi, and haven't seen any difference in power consumption. That's on Ubuntu 13.04 @ Thinkpad T530.
- threeseed 13y agoDropbox behaves very differently on OSX versus Linux I've found.
- throwaway2048 13y agolikely because linux has inotify
- andor 13y agoEvery modern operating system has inotify-like capabilities. Mac OS has an integrated desktop search since 2005, which wouldn't be feasible without filesystem events.
- aidos 13y agoDropbox has its own process though, doesn't it? dbfseventsd. sudo fs_usage -w I've been watching it recently and it seems to touch files that it shouldn't need to. I need to do more investigation. I uninstalled backblaze recently because I discovered that it manually scans the whole filesystem _all the time_.
- Osmium 13y agoThanks for the Backblaze info! That's really good to know. Do you know if CrashPlan is any saner? Resource usage was a big factor when deciding between the two, and I want to know if I've made the right choice :)
- aidos 13y agoI haven't used CrashPlan so I can't really say, sorry. I've moved to Arq now which has been working very well for me but it's OSX only.
- Osmium 13y agoThanks for the reply -- I've looked at Arq before too. I find it interesting Arq (S3) is a third the price of Tarsnap (S3). Out of interest, if you don't mind me asking, how large is your backup, and do you use S3 or Glacier backend?
- aidos 13y agoInteresting question - I hadn't gotten around to checking the numbers yet myself. So, Indexes are stored in S3, data is on Glacier ~450GB of data stored 316,189 Requests to upload it all (main cost) $17.39 to upload it all $5.09 to store it last month (but upload was incomplete) Expect closer to $6-$7 to store it this month ~$120 to restore it all (that was a back of the napkin figure before I started) Arq has a number of good things to recommend it. The creator lurks around here, which is always nice to know. The design is very sensible - it's basically a git index on S3 with the data blobs in Glacier. The storage format is open and documented. All the data is encrypted using your own key locally and then pushed to your own AWS account. It works out really cheap if you use Glacier (only planning on restoring in catastrophic circumstances). It all just works. The interface is easy and intuitive. I pushed my data to the EU region since it's closer. The more I think about it the happier I am with my choice at the moment. Even if I changed my mind and stopped using it - it's nice knowing that for a few dollars a month I have a huge snapshot of my data in a reasonable format in my AWS account.
- chrisdevereux 13y agoFSEvent/NSFilePresenter APIs do the same on OS X. Nobody should be polling for changes to files.
- nicoschuele 13y agoMy method is not scientific at all, I agree with that BUT the facts remain: without dropbox on (even after full sync and supposedly idle), my battery life is multiplied by nearly 3. As a side note, Dropbox behaves differently on OS X. I've never noticed this issue on Windows 8 machines.