My hunch is that the student is frustrated because Dropbox sync speeds are sometimes less than the network line speed (maybe due to the agent having to scan the

My hunch is that the student is frustrated because Dropbox sync speeds are sometimes less than the network line speed (maybe due to the agent having to scan the filesystem to look for changes, or because the agent is syncing many small files, or because Dropbox or the ISP or anyone in the middle is throttling the connection). This is particularly noticeable if you sync a new computer on a different network from the rest of your Dropbox machines (say, a EC2 VPS, or on a university network away from home) because when you're on the same network, LAN sync is often used for a large portion of the initial sync. I suspect the student thinks that distributing his/her files among his/her friends and/or multiple services (bittorrent-style) will allow his/her to increase throughput -- however, I suspect it will merely increase complexity (and possibly also cost) without actually making syncing/back-up faster.