[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.

[Osmium]

Thanks for the reply -- I've looked at Arq before too. I find it interesting Arq (S3) is a third the price of Tarsnap (S3).

Out of interest, if you don't mind me asking, how large is your backup, and do you use S3 or Glacier backend?

[chrisdevereux]

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