04 June, 2015

Computer with dropbox slows: Usage Tips


I recently repaired a computer that "slowed down" a lot to boot. It was a laptop with Celeron, quite outdated already. What was my surprise that the cause that produced this problem was they had shared a folder several gigabytes of information in Dropbox  (videos and photos on vacation)  and not a virus; the users wanted to backup everything in the cloud, so that every time Dropbox was checking changes, the hard drive was "going crazy".



TIPS FOR DROPBOX
The dropbox, for changes in files and synchronize with internet, indexes completely the files, and needs to continuously access the hard disk. This saves bandwidth by synchronizing only blocks that have really changed on the files (e.g. Google Drive back up the entire file), but that is an extra workload for slower computers that can make them unusable.
If major changes to files are made ​​(such as adding several large files) this causes the computer to not responding; having a slow laptop hard drive (low consumption saves battery).
To avoid this you should go slowly putting files in the dropbox folder, or use it only for the essential.
I do recommend to use Dropbox only for small folders or files, less than 1 GByte in total if possible.
If your computer crashes because of this, it is best to start in "failsafe" giving the F8 key while booting and selecting that option, and once in Windows uninstall Dropbox or disable the auto-synchronization to be manually .

Dropbox is not cool

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