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by CJefferson 4997 days ago
I can understand why, particularly given Dropbox's aim of being as simple as it can possibly be. At the moment the rule is simple. At the moment the cloud can be relied on as the authorative copy which everyone syncs with. If I have 3 or more local clients, all talking and sharing over LAN, many issues get very complicated.
1 comments
mnutt 4997 days ago
It seems like it could be mitigated by having the client hash the file and notify the cloud of the hash of the file it intends to upload first. But I think your explanation for why they don't currently do LAN-only sharing is correct.
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Dylan16807 4997 days ago
It does do that; I don't understand what you think it'll fix when it comes to multiple clients.

Do you want Dropbox to make a ghost entry with the contents and the hash, then start transferring it over LAN right away? That's going to be confusing when a ghosted file doesn't behave the same as a normal unsynced file. Especially if you start doing collaborative work and the version history is broken because that's cloud-based.

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