I Thought Dropbox Was Just rsync + Cron: Welcome to Engineering

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When I started out, I told anyone who’d listen that cloud storage was trivial. “How hard could it be? Just rsync the diffs and call it a day.” Here’s what I didn’t understand: Dropbox isn’t rsync . It’s a distributed consensus algorithm wrapped in delta encoding, layered atop conflict resolution heuristics, with background sync threads that don’t die…

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