Sunday, May 1, 2011

What if I format my hard disk with Dropbox in it?

What if I format my hard disk with Dropbox in it?

It is my habit to format my hard disk leaving sometimes home partition intact towards the end of the year but this year I waited till March to do that since some of the Linux Distribution new versions are released around that time.
What would happen to my Dropbox content if I format my hard disk.
I did not have a clue?
What I did was to save all the contents (Copy them to a DVD) in my Dropbox (which was little over 2GiB) except the 2 Linux images I have saved there.
Then I completely forgot about restoring my Dropbox to its original content.

Then just to see what is up there I logged into Dropbox but I could see nothing in my folder.

So disappointed I went on with my work and later hovered over Dropbox icon on my desktop panel to see it is downloading the files back to the Dropbox folder.
With over 1700 files it indicated it might takes 7 days to download the entire content.
Well it was not a shock of the day for me.
It took 7 days, 7 hours and 7 minutes to download Debian Multi DVD and my Dropbox folder took 7 days I can take it sitting upright not lying down.
My only worry was I was downloading the last 1.4 GiB of Supreme Super Gamer (0f 8 GiB in total) and it would adversely effect the completion of the download.
Mind you I was downloading Pollipix which was at snail pace.
Quickly stopped other Torrents downloads from the queue and went to sleep.
It was not something I am going to worry except I have to keep my computer running overnight (not day time, which is even slower).

Got up early in the morning the My DAY Holiday (unlike workers who are never on work on working days in this country but fully worked up today) doing something or finishing something not finished intellectually was my intention and I looked at the Dropbox to see it had downloaded all except two images.

While I was typing this Puppy (Wary) was completed and the other Linux image which is over 1 GiB would be downloaded in its own time.

But to my surprise the net effect on my Torrent download was about 250 MiB (usually 1.0 GiB overnight but today 750 MiB).

That I can live with it with painfully slow download speed in this country and I am not going to pay enormous amount in addition to Peo TV and the ADSL (which they fail to keep optimum contractual obligations) for a little bit of extra pace on download speed.

If politicians are slow here especially after holidays so can I be!

So synchronization does work but that depends on the download speed of the link you have.

Whole idea of having the Dropbox was to keep some live images there for my friends to share but I am reconsidering my wisdom on this issue and thinking on having a Light Weight Dropbox Folder or delete all the heavy files before formatting the hard disk.
Even the problem here is I have several computers and in which computer I keep my Dropbox Folder active.
Certainly not in my laptop.
In any case i believe the Dropbox has a way of synchronizing like in Torrents to the last second and start at the point I switched off the computer.
This is a question I post to all the Cloud Hosting Companies out there.
Have you got the correct solution without compromising my downloads.
In my case I was smart enough to give a rest to the Dropbox when I was doing (mission critical activity-the catch phrase of the corporate complainers) my last few downloads that is also the games and not mission critical in any sense but me have to wait few ours more to play a game or two on my Weekend or the May DAY Holiday!

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