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Many users that have large quantity of files in Dropbox complains about the indexing time as Dropbox implements a two-way synchronization that always monitor the selected folders to sync. This issue is currently affecting me as I have 4TB files on my Dropbox and whenever I start the Dropbox app it hangs the explorer on Windows making it unusable until the indexing process is completed.
This idea is to introduce a Manual-Sync mode for folders that the user can mark as manual-sync and decide when to download or upload the data from that folder from/to Dropbox so it avoids the constant indexing for folders with huge amount of files.
For Example:
A music library of 2TB of small files (20-50MB size) can be marked as Manual-Sync with this:
- Dropbox client will still show the contents as Online-Only for a folder that exists on the Dropbox server.
- The user can decide which folders to upload or download. The option to Upload/Download a manual-synced folder should display in the right-click context menu.
- When uploading/downloading a specific folder, the indexing will happen in the scope of that folder reducing the indexing time and the indexing will happen whenever the user wants to sync the folder to upload or download data.
- The data in folders set as Manual-Sync is only local and can be deleted without affecting the Dropbox server files.
- Folder marked as Manual-Sync will be ignored from the Dropbox regular indexed process as it should only index the folders that are defined by the user to auto-sync (In the same way it works now)
This will help to improve the Dropbox client performance and will give more control to the users regarding the folders they want to auto sync as users will be able to just download a large folder to have a local copy without the worries of indexing time and continue using Dropbox for other folders without being taxed by indexing times of folders that are marked as Manual-Sync.
