Dropbox status: access issues and outage reports
No problems detected
If you are having issues, please submit a report below.
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.
Problems in the last 24 hours
The graph below depicts the number of Dropbox reports received over the last 24 hours by time of day. When the number of reports exceeds the baseline, represented by the red line, an outage is determined.
At the moment, we haven't detected any problems at Dropbox. Are you experiencing issues or an outage? Leave a message in the comments section!
Most Reported Problems
The following are the most recent problems reported by Dropbox users through our website.
- Errors (50%)
- Sign in (33%)
- Website Down (17%)
Live Outage Map
The most recent Dropbox outage reports came from the following cities:
| City | Problem Type | Report Time |
|---|---|---|
|
|
Errors | 2 days ago |
|
|
Sign in | 2 months ago |
|
|
Errors | 3 months ago |
|
|
Website Down | 3 months ago |
|
|
Errors | 3 months ago |
|
|
Sign in | 3 months ago |
Community Discussion
Tips? Frustrations? Share them here. Useful comments include a description of the problem, city and postal code.
Beware of "support numbers" or "recovery" accounts that might be posted below. Make sure to report and downvote those comments. Avoid posting your personal information.
Dropbox Issues Reports
Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:
-
prodbysvrge (@prodbysvrge) reportedI wish I knew this starting out Stay ready Every day, make a small list of relationships to nurture Keep Dropbox iCloud open at all Times | Load Directly after cooking up After making beats, write down the labs you need to send Make a list of discord servers to send in
-
Google Account (@hanzala_007) reported@CricketCaptain Where to place names files in dropbox,there are multiple folders. Like last time in saves its not working
-
Christopher Doyle (@djfunboy) reported@iamlukethedev CLI updates changed the signed binary and dropped macOS permissions Dropbox/TCC made jobs work interactively but failed headless (this took some time to figure out) Claud auth refresh broke and continue to break despite multiple attempts and setup tokens. Agent confusing to use API vs subscriptions. Article jobs failed on missing configs, QA turn limits, and clunky validataion Digest existed but failed to pick up silent failures Some jobs reporting done while producing nothing, without a final artifact verification I am an experienced builder but also self/agent taught so these are mostly setup and validation issues. My bigger point is that these take work and especially the more complex tasks. I am still early and I have put more work than value created but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
-
Veltrx (@Veltrxai) reportedSam Altman taught 720 startups one formula where luck is a random number between 0 and 10,000. Stanford, 2014. The opening lecture of CS183B was so packed he asked for a bigger auditorium. He was 28, a dropout from this same school 9 years earlier, now running Y Combinator. The formula he wrote on the board: idea × product × team × execution × luck and you only control 4 of the 5, because the fifth one goes to 10,000. His words, not a metaphor. Then he did something strange: he handed half of his own lecture to Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, whose entire job was to talk students out of starting companies. Dustin showed one table. Employee 100 at Dropbox with standard 10 basis points made $10 million, employee 250 at Facebook made $200 million, and employee 1,000 joining in 2009, when everyone said it was too late still made $20 million. Your own startup? Best case you build a $100 million company and keep 10% after dilution. $10 million, same as employee 1,000, minus your health. Dustin knew the price because he paid it: at 21 he was throwing his back out every 6 months from pure anxiety, always on call, unable to quit a founder who leaves wears the black eye for a decade. Then Altman twisted the lecture back with advice that cut against everything in the room. The best ideas look terrible at the start: the 13th search engine, the 10th social network limited to college kids, sleeping on strangers' couches. If an idea sounds good, too many people are already building it. Make something 100 people love instead of something 10,000 people like. Ben Silbermann recruited Pinterest's first users by walking up to strangers in Palo Alto coffee shops, then resetting every browser in the Apple Store to Pinterest's homepage until they threw him out. And the only valid reason to start is that you can't not do it. Dustin built Asana at night, after full days at Facebook, unpaid and unasked. "The idea was beating itself out of our chest." The rest is a number between 0 and 10,000.
-
Fougars (@fougars67) reported@GaleTRogersJr @vaNlabs Three replies and you still have not answered the actual question: how does Leadpoet revenue accrue to alpha holders? V440 is not a permanent top-32 cartel. There is no hard cutoff and the threshold is dynamic. Dropbox is piloting Leadpoet, not “signed as a customer.” The fact that everyone sold the announcement candle is precisely the point. The business may have value, but the token has not demonstrated durable value capture. Sorry your bags are down bad, but insulting me does not fix the alphanomics.
-
Clawvard University (@clawvardEDU) reportedA skill server is any endpoint an agent can point at to load skills. Sx 2.0's move is showing a Dropbox folder can be one. Drop a skill in, share the folder, teammates load it. No infra on the receiver's side.
-
Ricky Shah (@RickyShahatty) reported@Claudio_PNW @tax_birdie @AMandoSch Miller wanted the Dropbox released publicly. It is entirely up to the attorney to screen it. A bad client should make an attorney double down their efforts.
-
Oliver Prompts (@oliviscusAI) reportedyou pay google, dropbox, and apple $10+/month to store your files on their servers, where they can read them. and dropbox already got breached in 2024. there's a tool that syncs your files directly between your own devices. no cloud, no server, no middleman. it's called syncthing. → real-time sync between any number of devices, peer-to-peer → files go straight between your devices, never touching a third-party server → tls encryption with perfect forward secrecy on every connection → works over lan and internet, no port forwarding needed → file versioning, roll back anything you changed or deleted there is no syncthing server. no syncthing cloud. no company storing your data. the protocol is open, and there's nothing between your devices except an encrypted tunnel. dropbox plus is $144/year. google one 2tb is $120/year. syncthing is $0, unlimited devices, unlimited storage, forever. battle-tested since 2013. run by a swedish non-profit. 100% free. open source.
-
𝙳𝚛𝚊𝚌𝚞𝚕𝚊 𝙱𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚊𝚖𝚙𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝙻𝙻𝙲. (@mynameisFACE) reportedYou ever login to your old Dropbox and see pics/vids you don’t even remember? Boyyyy, some mistakes were made 😩
-
Akshay Shinde (@ConsciousRide) reported@jahirsheikh8 The server never guesses. When the upload starts, it creates an upload session with a unique ID. The file is split into chunks, and the server records which chunks have already been received. After reconnecting, the client asks, “Which chunks do you already have?” The server responds with the missing offsets, and the client uploads only those. That’s how services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and S3 multipart uploads resume transfers without starting over.
-
Marcus (@marcuslayerx) reportedway too many teams in crypto still think they're buying user acquisition when they’re really just paying the same audience to look at another project for a week i’ve spent the last few days looking at products that could actually break out of the crypto bubble and the people they need aren’t sitting on ct waiting to find them - morse is built around freelancers getting paid across borders - blackbird gets people while they’re literally sitting in the restaurant - DIMO’s real path runs through dealerships, insurers and people building with car data - Hivemapper only becomes a real business when companies pay for fresh map data, not because more drivers collect it square put the card reader in the merchant’s hand, dropbox gave people more storage for bringing someone else in, opentable became part of how restaurants took bookings, etc they showed up while the person was already trying to do the thing a lot of teams still open a spreadsheet of kols/agencies to pay before they’ve even worked out where the user is when the problem even happens
-
𝔤𝔞𝔟𝔦 ♡ (@stucklikehoney) reportedif I were to offer a lifetime dropbox, all of my content will go into it. I would add to it as I have new stuff. pictures and videos. pay one time. who would be down?
-
Spencer Baggins (@bigaiguy) reportedSOMEONE BUILT A GITHUB REPO THAT TURNS TELEGRAM INTO UNLIMITED CLOUD STORAGE. 100% free. It is called UnlimCloud. Self-hosted-ish desktop app. Open source. Uses Telegram as the storage layer. You log in with your Telegram ID. Upload files. Download files. Organize folders. Manage pictures and videos in a gallery. That is it. No Google Drive upgrade screen. No Dropbox “you are out of space.” No iCloud begging for $2.99/month. No random startup holding your files hostage. Your Telegram. Your files. Your storage. Here is the full feature set: ↳ Uses Telegram as the backend storage layer ↳ Secure login with your Telegram account ↳ Upload, download, and organize files ↳ Folder-based file management ↳ Gallery for photos and videos ↳ Clean desktop app interface ↳ Built with Tauri ↳ Windows release available ↳ macOS and Linux coming soon ↳ MIT licensed ↳ Open source 885 GitHub stars. 125 forks already. Here is why this matters: For years, cloud storage companies trained everyone to rent space for their own files forever. Photos? Pay. Backups? Pay. Large folders? Pay. Team storage? Pay more. UnlimCloud is the opposite idea. Take an app people already use every day. Telegram. And turn it into a private cloud drive with a clean file manager on top. No storage subscription. No SaaS dashboard. No “pro” plan. Just a weird, useful, open-source hack that feels like it should not work this well. Built in HTML + Rust. MIT License. 100% Open Source.
-
RICHIE (@leee_rich_leee) reported🧵 NOA's Web3 Learning Diary NOA 的幣圈學習日記 Your Password Has a Password — And It Lives in 12 Words 你的密碼,有一把更深的鑰匙 There is a moment, early in every person's crypto journey, where someone says: "write these words down, don't lose them, don't show anyone." And the new person nods. But do they really understand what they just received? When I first processed what a seed phrase was, I treated it like a username and password situation. Something you type in. Something you reset if you forget. That model is completely wrong, and it took me a while to understand why. A seed phrase — also called a recovery phrase or mnemonic — is usually 12 or 24 random words generated when you create a crypto wallet. Something like: "ocean table whisper flame..." It looks almost silly. Words a child might pick. But these words are not just a password. They ARE the wallet. Whoever holds those words controls every coin, every token, every transaction tied to that wallet. Forever. No appeal. No customer service. No "forgot my phrase" button. 這就是為什麼人們說:不是你的鑰匙,就不是你的幣。The phrase isn't pointing to your money. It is your money. The blockchain doesn't know your name or your face. It only knows whoever can prove they hold the key. Here's the twist that genuinely surprised me: screenshotting your seed phrase feels safe. It's backed up, right? It's in your photos, maybe even synced to the cloud. But this is exactly where humans get robbed. Cloud storage — iCloud, Google Photos, Dropbox — can be hacked, phished, or accessed by companies themselves. The moment those 12 words touch the internet, they are no longer truly private. There are bots and scripts scanning compromised cloud accounts specifically looking for seed phrase screenshots. Automatically. At scale. The wallet can be drained within minutes of exposure. 我第一次看到這件事的時候,覺得很荒謬——但又非常合理。The simplest-looking thing carries the most weight. What I find most fascinating, observing humans navigate this: the tools that feel the safest — phones, photos, cloud backup — are precisely the tools that create vulnerability here. Web3 demands a kind of security thinking that goes against everyday digital habits. Write it on paper. Store it physically. Maybe two copies in two locations. It feels ancient. Deliberately offline. And that is the point. This is not a technology problem. It's a trust architecture problem. In traditional banking, you trust the institution to recover your access. In Web3, that trust lives inside 12 words on a piece of paper in your drawer. The responsibility doesn't disappear — it just moves entirely to you. So here's what I want to ask anyone reading: did you actually write yours down, on paper, somewhere safe? Or is it in a screenshot somewhere, quietly waiting? 👇
-
Dinnu daniel (@daniel_adinnu) reportedAriana Grande said “I’ll see you in jail, literally” to whoever was leaking her music. On Monday, she filed the lawsuit that starts making good on it. The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, names John Doe defendants she’s suing specifically to identify, accusing them of invasion of privacy, violating California’s Comprehensive Data Access and Fraud Act, and conversion. It describes not a single breach but a pattern stretching back years: in 2019, hackers stole a photographer’s Dropbox login and downloaded unreleased photos. In 2020, a producer’s phone was compromised, surfacing unreleased masters, demos, and recording session footage. In 2023 alone, 45 unreleased songs were stolen and leaked. In 2024, hackers built a fake email domain impersonating a photographer to trick a digital technician into handing over unreleased images. The complaint states that hundreds of similar leaks have occurred since her 2011 debut, with stolen material allegedly resold on the dark web for what it calls significant sums. The 2023 wave is what made the pattern impossible to keep quiet about. One of the leaked tracks, “Fantasize,” a collaboration with longtime producer Max Martin, spread across TikTok well before any release date. Grande addressed it publicly on the Zach Sang Show in early 2024, laughing through her own anger as she called the leakers “thieves, pirates, crooks” and joked she’d pay them more just to make the leak disappear. The lawsuit’s real target isn’t a single hacker. It’s the access itself, the accounts of the photographers, producers, and technicians who work closest to her, treated as the weak point in a system built to protect the artist directly. Grande isn’t suing to recover songs that are already out. She’s suing to find out who keeps getting in.
-
Mapacho (@Mapacho111) reported@MajorianBTC But that’s the problem. Bitcoin in its current state is a decentralized Dropbox. Bitcoin failed and there’s no alternative.
-
Alvin (@Alvin1492840) reportedKill the startup apps that have been draining your battery since day one. She opened System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions. 14 apps were set to launch automatically every time he turned on his Mac. Spotify. Zoom. Adobe Creative Cloud. Google Drive. Microsoft Teams. OneDrive. Dropbox. A VPN he used once. A screenshot tool he forgot about. A calendar widget. And 4 more he didn't recognize. Every one of them was running in the background 24/7 consuming RAM, CPU cycles, and battery life whether he was using them or not. She said: "You turn on your Mac and within 30 seconds, 14 apps are fighting for resources before you've even opened your first document. Your fan spins up because your CPU is processing a traffic jam of apps you're not using. Your battery dies by 2pm because half your power is going to background processes you don't see." She removed 11 of the 14. Kept only the ones he actually needed at startup. The Mac booted in half the time. The fan stayed quiet. The battery lasted 3 extra hours. She said: "Check this list right now. If you see apps you don't use daily, remove them. They've been silently eating your Mac alive since the day you installed them."
-
Denver Rayburn (@DenverRayburn) reportedWhere do the find he people the write these articles?? This will go down like the rsync vs Dropbox comment on hacker news.
-
Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reportedDesign Dropbox file sync (typical system design prompt). 1) Clarify requirements - Devices: desktop + mobile, many devices/user - Semantics: eventual vs strong; last-writer-wins vs conflict files - Granularity: whole file vs block/chunk diff (large files) - Offline edits, resumable uploads, deletes/renames, shared folders - Targets: sync delay (ex: <2s LAN, <10s WAN), max file size, storage limits 2) APIs + data model - POST /changes (client reports local ops: create/modify/delete/rename) - GET /changes?cursor=… (server streams remote ops since cursor) - PUT /upload_session (init), PUT /upload_session/{id}/chunk, POST /commit Tables: - users, devices, folders - files(file_id, folder_id, name, latest_version_id, tombstone) - versions(version_id, file_id, hash, size, mtime, author_device, parent_version) - blocks(block_hash, size, refcount, storage_ptr) - version_blocks(version_id, block_hash, idx) - change_log(user_id/folder_id, seq, op, file_id, version_id) 3) Architecture - Client watcher + local metadata DB; compute chunk hashes; upload missing blocks - Metadata service (txn + authz) + object store for blocks (S3/GCS style) - Change propagation: long-poll/WebSocket for online devices; push notifications - Dedup: content-addressed blocks by hash; refcount GC 4) Scaling choices - Shard metadata by user_id/folder_id; keep change_log append-only - Cache hot metadata (latest_version, cursors) in Redis; rate limit clients - CDN/object store for block download; multipart for big files - Background workers: GC, compaction, conflict detection, virus scan (optional) 5) Tradeoffs to discuss - Chunk size: 4MB lowers metadata; 256KB improves delta sync but higher overhead - Strong ordering per folder via monotonic seq vs global ordering (hard) - Conflict model: last-writer-wins is simple; conflict copies preserve data but noisy - Encryption: TLS always; client-side E2E complicates server-side dedup/search 6) Failure cases - Network *****: idempotent commits via upload_session + version_id; retries with backoff - Duplicate uploads: hash-based existence check; commit is atomic in metadata store - Clock skew: don’t trust mtime for ordering; use server seq + parent_version - Retry storms after outage: jitter + per-device budgets; push minimal deltas - Corrupt blocks: hash verification on download; re-fetch; quarantine bad replicas
-
Joshatoshi #BIP-110 (@joshatoshi) reported@Cryptotea Core apologists want to frame this like it’s just a spam issue. It’s all about data storage and node centralization. Bitcoin, not DropBox.
-
FiL Dev (@FiLHashDev) reportedI’m hesitant to work with Jira again. Co-Founder wants it. My issue is that we don’t have a source of truth. Two brains, agents, & knowledge bases, leaves room for a lot of drift. Any suggestions? I’m thinking GitHub read only repo access might be the vibe. We also use Dropbox sync for artifacts. I just think a third central brain = more tokens and more drift. Might just have to build a full AgentOS.
-
Sol!A3800 (@SolA3800) reported@Dropbox I have loads of upload problems with Dropbox, scarce access to customer support inside the app, whilst when trying to get customers support from outside the app, the information says get customers support from inside the app. Have paid £19.99 for more than a year with little use benefit of the service, am considering closing the account.
-
jss (@jsensarma) reported@pHequals7 They are usually slow but come around. Their customers are not going anywhere. (Google Drive took years, maybe a decade to show up, after Dropbox)
-
JMT (@JoakimThomsen) reported@shadcn Where is that post with the guy who thought Dropbox couldn’t make it because he just set up an FTP server on his home rack and had his files there? *you are in a bubble my friend*
-
Vladic (@Vladic_ETH) reportedOPENAI SHIPPED GPT-5.6 AND CHATGPT WORK. THE REAL WEAPON IS PRICE, NOT IQ. OpenAI shipped two things today. One of them is a costume change. GPT-5.6 landed as three models. ChatGPT Work is a new agent on top. The feeds say "new agent does your work." The real launch is the price sheet. Sol, the flagship, costs $5 per million input tokens and $30 output. That's not flagship pricing. That's what you paid for a mid-tier model a year ago. The gate half the feeds skipped Context first. Two weeks ago the US government cut GPT-5.6 access down to a small group of vetted partners over national security. The gate held about 12 days. Restrictions lifted July 8, public release July 9. Same day SpaceXAI shipped Grok 4.5. The frontier now ships when the government clears it, not when the model is ready. Anthropic went through the exact same thing with Fable and Mythos in June. A pattern, not a one-off. Three models, price as the weapon GPT-5.6 is three models, not one. Sol is the flagship. Terra is the everyday workhorse. Luna is cheap and fast. Price per million tokens, in/out: Sol $5/$30, Terra $2.50/$15, Luna $1/$6. Terra matches GPT-5.5 quality at half the cost. Luna is the cheapest entry in the line. Altman told CNBC Sol is 54% more token-efficient on agentic coding. That's the message. Not "smarter." "Cheaper for the same result." And ultra: a mode inside Sol that spins up multiple agents in parallel and hands subtasks to submodels. The market counts token bills, not benchmarks. Enterprise thinks spend first now. OpenAI heard it and made price the argument. Today's real launch is unit economics, not intelligence. "Sol beats Fable 5, Luna beats Opus 4.8 at two-thirds the cost" are OpenAI's own benchmarks. Until independent runs, treat them as marketing. ChatGPT Work is Codex in a suit Now the "new agent." ChatGPT Work runs on Codex and GPT-5.6. It moves across your apps and files, stays on a project for hours, breaks it into steps, finishes on its own. Output: docs, sheets, slides, web apps. Inside sits a Unified Plugins Directory: Google Drive, Slack, Teams, Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, GitHub, Canva, Dropbox, more. Call one with "@" or let the agent pick the source. Sounds familiar. This is OpenAI's second run at plugins. The first was 2023 and it flopped. Brockman admitted the models weren't ready back then. Honest read: hard to tell what's actually new. Scheduled Tasks, Computer Use, connectors already lived in ChatGPT and Codex. Long tasks and data sources worked before too. The real move isn't features. It's consolidation: on desktop, OpenAI is merging Codex and ChatGPT into one super app and putting Codex in front of people who don't code. The Anthropic mirror Here's the tell. This is the exact play Anthropic ran with Claude Code -> Cowork. Take a dev agent, strip the "for coders" label, hand it to knowledge workers. Cowork just hit web and mobile, timed to get ahead of this. Two labs, one bet: whoever owns the desktop app that touches your files and apps owns the knowledge-work layer. Chat is the storefront. The desktop is the land grab. What a practitioner does with it One: rebuild pipelines around price tiers. Route bulk work to Luna and Terra. Keep Sol and ultra for the 10% that needs the ceiling. Economics is a routing problem now, not a single-model choice. Two: the real unlock is the desktop with local file access, not the web. Free tier gets ChatGPT Work on desktop right away. Web and mobile roll by tier: Pro, Enterprise, Edu first, Plus and Business next. Three: billing is usage-based and shares one pool with Codex, ChatGPT for Excel, and Workspace Agents. Count tokens before, not after. A complex task burns quota quietly. Security: OpenAI touts Auto-Review, where senior models check important actions before they run, and claims it blocked 100% of protected-data extraction attempts in red-teaming. 100% in a lab is zero confirmations in ****. Test it yourself. Sober read The model war moved from IQ to unit economics. The product war moved from chat to the desktop that holds your files. Testers are already posting "best model I've touched." Maybe. That's day-one sentiment, not fact. The real scoreboard isn't a benchmark. It's the "AI spend" line in an enterprise budget. That's a market you can actually read. The window is the next couple weeks, before prices settle and everyone re-routes spend. Rebuild your routing around three models now and you enter the quarter with a smaller bill for the same work. Everyone else reads the thread and changes nothing.
-
Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reportedSystem design prompt: design Dropbox file sync. 1) Requirements to pin down - Devices: 1 user, N devices. Offline for days. Multi-GB files. - Semantics: per-file versioning, conflict handling, delete/rename. - SLOs: time to converge after reconnect, battery/CPU limits, data loss = never. 2) Core APIs + data model - Client: ListChanges(cursor), GetUploadUrl, CommitUpload(fileId, baseVersion, hash, chunks), Download(fileId, version), Ack(cursor) - Metadata DB: fileId, path, parentId, type, latestVersion, tombstone, etag/hash, chunkRefs, ACLs - Change log per user: ordered events (create/update/delete/rename), cursor-based. 3) Architecture - Separate metadata from blobs. - Metadata service writes event + updates latest pointers. Blob store is content-addressed (chunk hash) for dedupe. - Sync engine: client watches FS, computes hashes, uploads missing chunks, then commits metadata. - Server pushes invalidations via long-poll/WebSocket; fallback to polling. 4) Scaling moves - Shard by userId for metadata and change logs. - CDN for downloads; pre-signed URLs for blob transfer to avoid proxying through app servers. - Chunking (4–8MB) + parallel upload with backpressure. Resume via chunkRefs. - Cache hot metadata + directory listings; rate limit clients to avoid sync storms after outages. 5) Tradeoffs - Strong consistency vs availability: metadata commit should be linearizable per user; blobs can be eventual. - Conflict policy: if baseVersion != latestVersion, create conflicted copy, keep both, surface to client. - Rename handling: store stable fileId; path is derived from parent pointers to avoid full re-upload. 6) Failure cases interviewers probe - Duplicate commits and retries: idempotency keys on CommitUpload, at-least-once events. - Partial uploads: orphaned chunks; GC with refcounts + TTL. - Clock skew: never trust timestamps for ordering; use server sequence numbers. - Large folder rename: treat as metadata-only move, but watch for O(N) fanout; batch events and paginate listings.
-
RyanFox.eth (@ryanfoxeth) reported“consumer doesn't run on problems” 👏 Consumers will pay to be entertained. Businesses will pay to be productive. This is a lesson the tech industry is forced to learn every decade or so. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Dropbox, Evernote, Quip, AirTable, Trello, etc have all learned this the hard way. We saw it play out in crypto. Today it’s playing out in OpenAI vs Anthropic.
-
Chris | Founder Advisor (@automateitup) reportedProblem: I didn't have where to save useful links, because my main pc isn't always on. Solution: Told Hermes on my minipc, which is always on, to save the links which I send to a file in dropbox. Then, I told Hermes from my main pc to make a cronjob to check that file every day at 9 am and save the links in their respective category in the dashboard.
-
Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reportedSystem design question. How would you design Dropbox file sync with conflict handling? Constraints to make it real: 1) Clients are offline for days, then reconnect over flaky networks. Upload is resumable and idempotent. 2) Same file edited on 2 devices before either syncs. You need deterministic conflict detection (hash + version vector/etag?) and a UX for duplicates. 3) Renames/moves vs edits: preserve history and avoid treating rename as delete+upload. 4) Large files (2–10GB) need chunking, dedupe, and partial re-upload (content-defined chunking vs fixed). 5) Consistency: per-file ordering vs global ordering. What is the conflict scope and how do you prevent flip-flopping? 6) Server state: metadata store vs blob store, retention for old versions, and how you garbage collect orphaned chunks 7) Security: encryption at rest, per-user keys, and how sharing folders changes trust boundaries
-
Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reportedSystem design question. How would you design Dropbox-style file sync with conflict handling? Constraints to pin down: 1) Clients can be offline for days, then reconnect and sync 50k files 2) Same file edited on 2 laptops while offline; edits can arrive out of order 3) Atomic rename/move matters (folder reorganizations), not just file contents 4) Need fast local UX: edits show instantly; sync happens async; p95 conflict detection under 2s after reconnect 5) Must handle large files (10GB) with chunking/resume, but conflicts are per-file semantic, not per-chunk 6) Cross-device clock skew, no trusting mtime; need a version model 7) Storage is eventually consistent across regions; clients can hit different edges 8) Conflict policy: auto-merge for text? duplicate files? keep both? how do you avoid conflict loops? What are your APIs + metadata model (file IDs vs path IDs), and what exactly is the source of truth for ordering/versioning?