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I'm curious about the accuracy of the statement. That implication is people intentionally upload/share over a billion files every day?

Given that dropbox is more of a sync service, I'm curious if that number more accurately reflects the number of files shared total or perhaps the number of sync events that occurred?

If people are actually uploading & sharing >1B files every day, Dropbox is immensely bigger than I had thought. Instagram, for example, sees 40M photo uploads per day.



That doesn't seem unreasonable at all. There are plenty of power users like myself who do pretty much everything in Dropbox, and there are also plenty of tiny little files created every day that can count towards that.

For example, deep down in my Dropbox I have a Code directory, which has plenty of other folders for most of the personal projects I work on. If I create a rails project, that puts in a bunch of basic files which can easily count for 100. I initialize a git repository on there and that can generate a few hundred more files. All of those add up quickly.

Here's the results of a few commands showcasing the size of my personal dropbox, and I'm sure there are other power users who are similar to me.

ls -aR Dropbox | wc -l

74397

du -sh Dropbox

32G (Just to note, .dropbox.cache accounts for 10G)


Right, so it's the latter -- People are using dropbox as an automated rsync. Which is fine.

It's just fundamentally different than people sharing over a billion memories and moments each day, I'd argue their tagline is very misleading.


Their tagline does say "create" rather than "share".


Well, people don't Instagram entire project directory trees with months or years of cruft, but they will stick those in their Dropbox. I would kind of expect Dropbox to boast much higher numbers.




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