[maikhoepfel]

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]

Dropbox behaves very differently on OSX versus Linux I've found.

[throwaway2048]

likely because linux has inotify

[andor]

Every 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]

Dropbox 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]

Thanks 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]

I 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.

[chrisdevereux]

FSEvent/NSFilePresenter APIs do the same on OS X. Nobody should be polling for changes to files.

[nicoschuele]

My 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.