![]() Only someone from Dropbox can authoritatively answer this question, IMHO. ![]() Unless you are a Dropbox engineer who definitely knows the answer, the answer remains a puzzle. It's important for me to know so I can take steps accordingly to monitor rogue file accesses. Unfortunately, Dropbox does not (as far as I know) disclose under what conditions it will access the file locally - you believe it **does not** and I respectfully believe it might. Such an MD5 compare would open and close the file locally and cause the date accessed to be changed. With my Free Dropbox, it might instead do a MD5 hash compare on portions of the 1M files and flag which ones it has done - it would do more and more over time to spread the load of it's servers (and my local machine) not being overwhelmed doing all 1M files MD5 compares at a time. And if my (Free) Dropbox has 1M files, it certainly cannot do a true file compare at Windows Startup - too time consuming. At some point it behooves the Dropbox servers to sample individual files and do a true file compare or at the very least do an MD5 compare. Even calculating MD5 hashes is time consuming on 1M files. That is, it is not enough to verify file integrity by looking at which files I have in my 1M files at startup and comparing only the filenames (paths) and file sizes and dates/time modified to what Dropbox has in the cloud or relying entirely on VSS. I have seen a few posts circa a few years ago about desiring file integrity checking with no clear answer. Thus integrity checking is paramount and the grand challenge is to do it without affecting local or Dropbox-server performance. ![]() That's because the computer can crash, files can be modified offline (command prompt from a recovery flash drive), there can be an over-reliance on the Volume Shadow Subsystem which can be problematic in a less than healthy computer, hard disk drive issues can occur (soft NTFS and hard disk errors), anti-virus filters screwing up (my Ransomware protection is off), the Dropbox service itself being problematic, etc., etc. That is, I still believe Dropbox service is doing this because it is very challenging and time consuming to verify the integrity of uploads of changed files. I can monitor access on my end and see if Dropbox is doing it locally. Unfortunately, I have to do the deep forensics to discover what is doing this. I have changed the file names for privacy.ĭirectory of c:\Users\Admin\Dropbox\Final\2019\OLD Here is an example of a folder I have not looked at for 4 years. No one else has physical access to my machine. If so, I'd like them to state that in documentation as it is disturbing to see the file accessed time changed all over the place and wonder who did this. Perhaps Dropbox does occasional sanity check true file comparisons and in between, it only looks at what Windows tells it changed combined with file size and date last modified on my machine vs. That tells me either someone on my machine (virus) is accessing these files or someone at Dropbox is accessing them through the Dropbox service. There are no other machines connected to my Dropbox, just one, my machine. When I do a dir /s /a: /o:d /TA c:\*.* I am observing the file access date and time is all over the place in Dropbox subfolders that I do not access at all - certainly haven't looked at them for years and years. I went back in and could not find the original using Search.
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