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Dropbox confirms that a bug within Selective Sync may have caused data loss

128 points by ghuntley 12y ago

copper_rose 12y ago
Yikes. All those nines of durability that Amazon provided for Dropbox...brought to naught by a bug in Dropbox's software.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
darrenkopp 12y ago
I aggressively use selective sync, and have since as long as I can remember yet I haven't got an email like this, so it may only affect specific users.
- bradleyland 12y ago
  It appears the circumstance is more specific than simply using selective sync. > This problem occurred when the Dropbox desktop application shut down or restarted while users were applying Selective Sync settings. So, you must be in the midst of applying selective sync settings while the app shuts down or restarts. Although I'm not sure what they mean when they say, "while users were applying selective sync settings." I'm not sure if this means: A) Changes made in the selection dialog box, but not committed (by clicking OK). or B) Changes committed, but still syncing. The former is an edge case, the later, not so much.
  - darrenkopp 12y ago
    Interesting. I know a few times I've had to kill the dropbox process while changing my selective sync settings before.
phren0logy 12y ago
This is exactly why sync is not a commodity. Dropbox is the very best at what they do, and even they have bugs. So when someone offers to sync your files for less, ask why.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  I thought there were many robust open source solutions out there and what made dropbox the winner was not that it is able to reliably sync, but that they made it easy to install and sync.
  - meowface 12y ago
    Dropbox is generally known for reliability in the face of competitors, however issues like this one and the highly embarrassing "anyone can login to anyone else's account" bug of 2011 definitely cast some doubt on using it as a sole storage option, or a solution to store any sensitive data. Most medium-sized and large companies refuse to touch Dropbox due to these reasons, especially in the financial and medical space. That said, I still employ it for personal use and like the product in general.
- hyperbovine 12y ago
  The sync heavy lifting in Dropbox is handled by librsync, or at least was at one point. librsync is very mature open source software, and this bug pertains to a particular interaction between the Dropbox GUI and a feature (selective sync) which they have somewhat tacked on to the core library. Long story short, you don't necessarily have to be Dropbox or employ a couple hundred software engineers to get inotify + rsync working well.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jamwt 12y ago
    > The sync heavy lifting in Dropbox is handled by librsync, or at least was at one point. Nope, highly custom process that involves librsync very little. The sophistication of what has to be done to solve this problem well would probably surprise you.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- ghuntley 12y ago
  @jancurn lost 8000 photos -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8101579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8101579
  - dmdeller 12y ago
    Thanks. I thought I remembered reading about this same issue some time ago. Seems like a rather slow response from Dropbox, doesn't it?
ghuntley 12y ago
Additional info from Dropbox support: We received several reports from users who used a Dropbox feature called Selective Sync and couldn’t locate certain files they’d saved in Dropbox. When we took a closer look, we discovered that older versions of the Dropbox client had introduced an issue affecting a small number of users whose Dropbox application shut down or restarted while users were applying Selective Sync settings. In light of all of this, we've taken the following steps to ensure the Selective Sync bug won’t affect anyone else going forward: 1) we've patched our desktop client so this issue doesn't exist in Dropbox anymore; 2) we've made sure all our users are running an updated version of the Dropbox client; and 3) we've retired all affected versions of the Dropbox client so no one can use them. We've also put additional testing in place to prevent this from happening in the future. We’re very sorry about this issue and the trouble it might have caused. We’ll keep doing our best to ensure our users' data is always safe and available to them.
- Ma8ee 12y ago
  Just so you folks don't have to scroll sideways: We received several reports from users who used a Dropbox feature called Selective Sync and couldn’t locate certain files they’d saved in Dropbox. When we took a closer look, we discovered that older versions of the Dropbox client had introduced an issue affecting a small number of users whose Dropbox application shut down or restarted while users were applying Selective Sync settings. In light of all of this, we've taken the following steps to ensure the Selective Sync bug won’t affect anyone else going forward: 1) we've patched our desktop client so this issue doesn't exist in Dropbox anymore; 2) we've made sure all our users are running an updated version of the Dropbox client; and 3) we've retired all affected versions of the Dropbox client so no one can use them. We've also put additional testing in place to prevent this from happening in the future. We’re very sorry about this issue and the trouble it might have caused. We’ll keep doing our best to ensure our users' data is always safe and available to them.
  - aqzman 12y ago
    Of course I see your comment after I finished reading the parent on my tablet. Thanks though!
nintendo1889 12y ago
I think this calls for an aggressively distributed, user-controlled backup system. Perhaps tahoe lafs based.
Lazare 12y ago
A good reminder that Dropbox is not a backup client, and should not be relied on for backups, any more than RAID should be.
- naiyt 12y ago
  Exactly what I came here to say. Syncing services can be great, but should not be a replacement for proper backups.
- danieldk 12y ago
  I disagree. A local tape NAS is also not a good backup, (god forbid) your house can burn down. A remote service like Backblaze is also not a good backup, they could go bankrupt or a software error could corrupt all your backups. A good backup policy uses a mixture of onsite and offsite, and Dropbox can be a (convenient) part of that. E.g., I store (non-sensitive) files in Dropbox, which gives me a certain period of undelete possibilities. My Dropbox folder is backed up on a local time machine backup. Critical parts of my Dropbox are also backed up using tarsnap, etc. A good backup policy diversifies, and Dropbox can be part of that.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  It can be a backup client, as long it's not the only one. I use OneDrive + a local NAS as my backup. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but having at least one copy locally and one copy in the cloud is quite safe. Obviously these two must not be synced in realtime (because if the sync software screws something up, then you might lose everything) -- so I just keep everything on OneDrive, and every couple of weeks manually copy the files (this is still not 100% safe because of possible file corruption issues, but it's OK for me).
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  It's about as good as any online backup system. It's much much better than raid. If you want to be picky you shouldn't rely on backups unless you have multiple independent backup systems, at least one offsite, at least one offline.
  - 12y ago
general_failure 12y ago
Dropbox should have understood that people are using it as a backup service. I mean carousel and other use cases sort of ebcourage and imply this. With that in mind, it baffling they didn't have any proper backups for user data.
- danieldk 12y ago
  It is a shame that they don't offer the unlimited packrat option anymore. It's still not backup, but at the very least people would be able to recover files in such cases. Also, if I understand correctly, Google Drive has a better policy here: removed files are just placed in the trash until you remove them from the trash. Of course, trash takes space up as well, but it protects better against such cases. I guess Dropbox is trying to maximize its profits with its 'remove after 30 days' policy.
  - grey_golem 12y ago
    I have been using the "packrat" feature for more than a year, and Dropbox sent me a similar notification today to tell me they lost several thousand files, 816 could not been restored. They were "lost" around 8 months ago, so "packrat" didn't save me at all. As it turns out, I have other backups of most of the files, and the rest of them weren't important. So I was lucky. Still, my confidence in the product is unlikely to recover. I want to note that I had been aware of the "dropbox is not backup" chorus, but that argument usually is just "sync is not backup", which is sort of obvious. The packrat feature pretty much addressed this issue, so dropbox with packrat WAS a backup solution. So the lesson here is never to rely on any ONE backup provider.
- mayneack 12y ago
  I use packrat - so the files they suggest that I might have had deleted were recoverable (though none of them were an error). If dropbox kept backups like you're suggesting, people would be complaining about how you can't delete damning files from them and that law enforcement was abusing this.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- coldtea 12y ago
  There have been lots of mail loss and other bugs in Gmail over the years. Here's an example: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-confirms-missing-email-problem-in-gmail/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-confirms-missi... And privacy/government implications wise, Google is hardly any better than Rice...
  - timothya 12y ago
    There may occasional bugs, but I don't know of any cases when Gmail actually lost emails. According to this talk [0], the bug referred to by that article caused some users' emails to be temporarily inaccessible, but all the emails were eventually recovered. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM#t=1734 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM#t=1734
paulhauggis 12y ago
I stopped using Dropbox because of this. I booted my system up one day and a ton of my files were deleted (locally). Luckily, this didn't affect the sync on my other systems.
chdir 12y ago
How old is this issue? The release notes don't spell out clearly if this bug was fixed in the past 2-3 updates (using v2.10.30 on Win 7) https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes
h43k3r 12y ago
I remember someone posting on HN about this, a month ago. Can't seem to find the link.
- dmdeller 12y ago
  Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441230
andrea_s 12y ago
This manifested for me as a large number of "conflicted copies" everywhere inside my main visual studio solution. Thankfully, source control saved the day... But I was really annoyed at Dropbox for a little while.
andy_ppp 12y ago
Ha, dropbox deleted my files the other day presumably due to this bug. I ranted on Twitter and they came back with the dropbox client can't delete files. Hmmmm. Seems I was correct :-/
sanyo 12y ago
We provide a self hosted sync offering for businesses. It is currently used by close to 1000 businesses. It took us almost 18 months from our launch to get the sync right. There are simply too many edge cases and the development team needs to closely work with the customers to identify and fix it. Even then our complexity is much less than dropbox. The largest customer of ours have 10000 users. Short story: if you plan to develop a sync product from scratch, be prepared to spend at least 2 years or hire core developers from Dropbox sync team. Eve now dropbox has issues with handling large number of small files. Try to stuff 200000 to 300000 files and see how it works.
sdizdar 12y ago
As founder of cloudHQ, I have to jump into this. Software products will have bugs. And people will make mistakes. We are all human. So even if you store data in Dropbox - it is smart to have one extra copy in some other cloud storage. Like Google Drive. Or Box. Or Egnyte. So if data is deleted in Dropbox (accidentally, maliciously, or due to a bug) you can restore it from other cloud. Of course, cloudHQ is the system which can do that: http://chq.io/hnsc http://chq.io/hnsc
NDizzle 12y ago
I was affected by this, but I realized it at the time. I have an older laptop that I turned on. It was a work laptop a few years ago, linked to my dropbox account, etc. Since then I had added a bunch of things like a bunch of git repos to a folder included in dropbox. I turned on that laptop and Dropbox started using 100% cpu after a few minutes. Then the fan kicked on and it was annoyingly loud so I looked at dropbox and saw it was chugging along in the repos directory. I went ahead and clicked on selective sync, unchecked repos, and left it alone for about 5 minutes. It was still 100% cpu, so I killed the dropbox task and restarted it. Minutes later, on another machine, I went to fetch from one of the repos and it had a gnarly error. So I went about investigating. I found my way to the dropbox events tab (on the website - the desktop client doesn't have this feature) and saw an event where dropbox decided to delete 7,800 files. I submitted a support request, but before they responded I had figured out it was (mostly) in the repos directory, which I fixed by simply deleting the repos and pulling from one of my servers. Anyways. There's my real world run in with this bug.
waverunner 12y ago
I was notified of the potential data loss and checked my data on the 'personalized web page.' Of the 12,000 files that may have been affected, I found only a subfolder of a few dozen photos that may've been removed. The problem is that when I clicked 'restore all' from within the subfolder, Dropbox restored all 12,000 files rather than just the files within the folder. Note to DB's UX team: when you place a Restore All checkbox above the lefthand file selection column, it means 'select and restore all files on the page', not 'lift the roof off my house and dump in all the shit I spent months decluttering.'
- mayneack 12y ago
  I've been hoping for a 'restore folder to date X' for a long time too.
kwijibob 12y ago
I have all my digital life on dropbox, a few hundred gig. One of my greatest fears is that thousands of files might disappear without me noticing for years. I use selective sync and twice I was looking for something that has disappeared and I have to restore it. I assumed maybe my wife accidentally deleted some files, but maybe it was dropbox? What is the solution to this anxiety?
- jeffpetes 12y ago
  Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Keep all the same data stored on another service, as well as on a physical backup that you keep yourself. If it's really important data you might keep a copy in a safe deposit box.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Perhaps you can have a cron job run against your local dropbox folder(s) and do an "md5deep" reporting only differences (or sha1deep or whatever, perhaps test which uses least resources, maybe nice it heavily too). Then you could have the output report saved to a folder (not a dropbox one!). Perhaps add another job to email/alert you if the "count" of lines in the report is greater than a certain number? Crude, for sure.

128 points by ghuntley 12y ago

Yikes. All those nines of durability that Amazon provided for Dropbox...brought to naught by a bug in Dropbox's software.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

darrenkopp 12y ago

I aggressively use selective sync, and have since as long as I can remember yet I haven't got an email like this, so it may only affect specific users.

bradleyland 12y ago
It appears the circumstance is more specific than simply using selective sync. > This problem occurred when the Dropbox desktop application shut down or restarted while users were applying Selective Sync settings. So, you must be in the midst of applying selective sync settings while the app shuts down or restarts. Although I'm not sure what they mean when they say, "while users were applying selective sync settings." I'm not sure if this means: A) Changes made in the selection dialog box, but not committed (by clicking OK). or B) Changes committed, but still syncing. The former is an edge case, the later, not so much.
- darrenkopp 12y ago
  Interesting. I know a few times I've had to kill the dropbox process while changing my selective sync settings before.

phren0logy 12y ago

This is exactly why sync is not a commodity. Dropbox is the very best at what they do, and even they have bugs. So when someone offers to sync your files for less, ask why.

wodenokoto 12y ago
I thought there were many robust open source solutions out there and what made dropbox the winner was not that it is able to reliably sync, but that they made it easy to install and sync.
- meowface 12y ago
  Dropbox is generally known for reliability in the face of competitors, however issues like this one and the highly embarrassing "anyone can login to anyone else's account" bug of 2011 definitely cast some doubt on using it as a sole storage option, or a solution to store any sensitive data. Most medium-sized and large companies refuse to touch Dropbox due to these reasons, especially in the financial and medical space. That said, I still employ it for personal use and like the product in general.
hyperbovine 12y ago
The sync heavy lifting in Dropbox is handled by librsync, or at least was at one point. librsync is very mature open source software, and this bug pertains to a particular interaction between the Dropbox GUI and a feature (selective sync) which they have somewhat tacked on to the core library. Long story short, you don't necessarily have to be Dropbox or employ a couple hundred software engineers to get inotify + rsync working well.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jamwt 12y ago
  > The sync heavy lifting in Dropbox is handled by librsync, or at least was at one point. Nope, highly custom process that involves librsync very little. The sophistication of what has to be done to solve this problem well would probably surprise you.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ghuntley 12y ago
@jancurn lost 8000 photos -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8101579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8101579
- dmdeller 12y ago
  Thanks. I thought I remembered reading about this same issue some time ago. Seems like a rather slow response from Dropbox, doesn't it?

ghuntley 12y ago

Additional info from Dropbox support: We received several reports from users who used a Dropbox feature called Selective Sync and couldn’t locate certain files they’d saved in Dropbox. When we took a closer look, we discovered that older versions of the Dropbox client had introduced an issue affecting a small number of users whose Dropbox application shut down or restarted while users were applying Selective Sync settings. In light of all of this, we've taken the following steps to ensure the Selective Sync bug won’t affect anyone else going forward: 1) we've patched our desktop client so this issue doesn't exist in Dropbox anymore; 2) we've made sure all our users are running an updated version of the Dropbox client; and 3) we've retired all affected versions of the Dropbox client so no one can use them. We've also put additional testing in place to prevent this from happening in the future. We’re very sorry about this issue and the trouble it might have caused. We’ll keep doing our best to ensure our users' data is always safe and available to them.

Ma8ee 12y ago
Just so you folks don't have to scroll sideways: We received several reports from users who used a Dropbox feature called Selective Sync and couldn’t locate certain files they’d saved in Dropbox. When we took a closer look, we discovered that older versions of the Dropbox client had introduced an issue affecting a small number of users whose Dropbox application shut down or restarted while users were applying Selective Sync settings. In light of all of this, we've taken the following steps to ensure the Selective Sync bug won’t affect anyone else going forward: 1) we've patched our desktop client so this issue doesn't exist in Dropbox anymore; 2) we've made sure all our users are running an updated version of the Dropbox client; and 3) we've retired all affected versions of the Dropbox client so no one can use them. We've also put additional testing in place to prevent this from happening in the future. We’re very sorry about this issue and the trouble it might have caused. We’ll keep doing our best to ensure our users' data is always safe and available to them.
- aqzman 12y ago
  Of course I see your comment after I finished reading the parent on my tablet. Thanks though!

nintendo1889 12y ago

I think this calls for an aggressively distributed, user-controlled backup system. Perhaps tahoe lafs based.

Lazare 12y ago

A good reminder that Dropbox is not a backup client, and should not be relied on for backups, any more than RAID should be.

naiyt 12y ago
Exactly what I came here to say. Syncing services can be great, but should not be a replacement for proper backups.
danieldk 12y ago
I disagree. A local tape NAS is also not a good backup, (god forbid) your house can burn down. A remote service like Backblaze is also not a good backup, they could go bankrupt or a software error could corrupt all your backups. A good backup policy uses a mixture of onsite and offsite, and Dropbox can be a (convenient) part of that. E.g., I store (non-sensitive) files in Dropbox, which gives me a certain period of undelete possibilities. My Dropbox folder is backed up on a local time machine backup. Critical parts of my Dropbox are also backed up using tarsnap, etc. A good backup policy diversifies, and Dropbox can be part of that.
sz4kerto 12y ago
It can be a backup client, as long it's not the only one. I use OneDrive + a local NAS as my backup. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but having at least one copy locally and one copy in the cloud is quite safe. Obviously these two must not be synced in realtime (because if the sync software screws something up, then you might lose everything) -- so I just keep everything on OneDrive, and every couple of weeks manually copy the files (this is still not 100% safe because of possible file corruption issues, but it's OK for me).
Dylan16807 12y ago
It's about as good as any online backup system. It's much much better than raid. If you want to be picky you shouldn't rely on backups unless you have multiple independent backup systems, at least one offsite, at least one offline.
- 12y ago

general_failure 12y ago

Dropbox should have understood that people are using it as a backup service. I mean carousel and other use cases sort of ebcourage and imply this. With that in mind, it baffling they didn't have any proper backups for user data.

danieldk 12y ago
It is a shame that they don't offer the unlimited packrat option anymore. It's still not backup, but at the very least people would be able to recover files in such cases. Also, if I understand correctly, Google Drive has a better policy here: removed files are just placed in the trash until you remove them from the trash. Of course, trash takes space up as well, but it protects better against such cases. I guess Dropbox is trying to maximize its profits with its 'remove after 30 days' policy.
- grey_golem 12y ago
  I have been using the "packrat" feature for more than a year, and Dropbox sent me a similar notification today to tell me they lost several thousand files, 816 could not been restored. They were "lost" around 8 months ago, so "packrat" didn't save me at all. As it turns out, I have other backups of most of the files, and the rest of them weren't important. So I was lucky. Still, my confidence in the product is unlikely to recover. I want to note that I had been aware of the "dropbox is not backup" chorus, but that argument usually is just "sync is not backup", which is sort of obvious. The packrat feature pretty much addressed this issue, so dropbox with packrat WAS a backup solution. So the lesson here is never to rely on any ONE backup provider.
mayneack 12y ago
I use packrat - so the files they suggest that I might have had deleted were recoverable (though none of them were an error). If dropbox kept backups like you're suggesting, people would be complaining about how you can't delete damning files from them and that law enforcement was abusing this.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 12y ago
There have been lots of mail loss and other bugs in Gmail over the years. Here's an example: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-confirms-missing-email-problem-in-gmail/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-confirms-missi... And privacy/government implications wise, Google is hardly any better than Rice...
- timothya 12y ago
  There may occasional bugs, but I don't know of any cases when Gmail actually lost emails. According to this talk [0], the bug referred to by that article caused some users' emails to be temporarily inaccessible, but all the emails were eventually recovered. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM#t=1734 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM#t=1734

paulhauggis 12y ago

I stopped using Dropbox because of this. I booted my system up one day and a ton of my files were deleted (locally). Luckily, this didn't affect the sync on my other systems.

chdir 12y ago

How old is this issue? The release notes don't spell out clearly if this bug was fixed in the past 2-3 updates (using v2.10.30 on Win 7) https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes

h43k3r 12y ago

I remember someone posting on HN about this, a month ago. Can't seem to find the link.

dmdeller 12y ago
Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441230

andrea_s 12y ago

This manifested for me as a large number of "conflicted copies" everywhere inside my main visual studio solution. Thankfully, source control saved the day... But I was really annoyed at Dropbox for a little while.

andy_ppp 12y ago

Ha, dropbox deleted my files the other day presumably due to this bug. I ranted on Twitter and they came back with the dropbox client can't delete files. Hmmmm. Seems I was correct :-/

sanyo 12y ago

We provide a self hosted sync offering for businesses. It is currently used by close to 1000 businesses. It took us almost 18 months from our launch to get the sync right. There are simply too many edge cases and the development team needs to closely work with the customers to identify and fix it. Even then our complexity is much less than dropbox. The largest customer of ours have 10000 users. Short story: if you plan to develop a sync product from scratch, be prepared to spend at least 2 years or hire core developers from Dropbox sync team. Eve now dropbox has issues with handling large number of small files. Try to stuff 200000 to 300000 files and see how it works.

sdizdar 12y ago

As founder of cloudHQ, I have to jump into this. Software products will have bugs. And people will make mistakes. We are all human. So even if you store data in Dropbox - it is smart to have one extra copy in some other cloud storage. Like Google Drive. Or Box. Or Egnyte. So if data is deleted in Dropbox (accidentally, maliciously, or due to a bug) you can restore it from other cloud. Of course, cloudHQ is the system which can do that: http://chq.io/hnsc http://chq.io/hnsc

NDizzle 12y ago

I was affected by this, but I realized it at the time. I have an older laptop that I turned on. It was a work laptop a few years ago, linked to my dropbox account, etc. Since then I had added a bunch of things like a bunch of git repos to a folder included in dropbox. I turned on that laptop and Dropbox started using 100% cpu after a few minutes. Then the fan kicked on and it was annoyingly loud so I looked at dropbox and saw it was chugging along in the repos directory. I went ahead and clicked on selective sync, unchecked repos, and left it alone for about 5 minutes. It was still 100% cpu, so I killed the dropbox task and restarted it. Minutes later, on another machine, I went to fetch from one of the repos and it had a gnarly error. So I went about investigating. I found my way to the dropbox events tab (on the website - the desktop client doesn't have this feature) and saw an event where dropbox decided to delete 7,800 files. I submitted a support request, but before they responded I had figured out it was (mostly) in the repos directory, which I fixed by simply deleting the repos and pulling from one of my servers. Anyways. There's my real world run in with this bug.

waverunner 12y ago

I was notified of the potential data loss and checked my data on the 'personalized web page.' Of the 12,000 files that may have been affected, I found only a subfolder of a few dozen photos that may've been removed. The problem is that when I clicked 'restore all' from within the subfolder, Dropbox restored all 12,000 files rather than just the files within the folder. Note to DB's UX team: when you place a Restore All checkbox above the lefthand file selection column, it means 'select and restore all files on the page', not 'lift the roof off my house and dump in all the shit I spent months decluttering.'

mayneack 12y ago
I've been hoping for a 'restore folder to date X' for a long time too.

kwijibob 12y ago

I have all my digital life on dropbox, a few hundred gig. One of my greatest fears is that thousands of files might disappear without me noticing for years. I use selective sync and twice I was looking for something that has disappeared and I have to restore it. I assumed maybe my wife accidentally deleted some files, but maybe it was dropbox? What is the solution to this anxiety?

jeffpetes 12y ago
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Keep all the same data stored on another service, as well as on a physical backup that you keep yourself. If it's really important data you might keep a copy in a safe deposit box.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Perhaps you can have a cron job run against your local dropbox folder(s) and do an "md5deep" reporting only differences (or sha1deep or whatever, perhaps test which uses least resources, maybe nice it heavily too). Then you could have the output report saved to a folder (not a dropbox one!). Perhaps add another job to email/alert you if the "count" of lines in the report is greater than a certain number? Crude, for sure.