HACKER Q&A
📣 thatonewhere

How to build something like Dropbox


I have an idea that would benefit from a file sync functionality similar to Dropbox/Box/etc. Sync is important for this idea to work, but also seems like a solved problem, so I would prefer to not have to implement it myself. However I don’t think there are APIs provided by these services that let you sync to your own backend. Dropbox deprecated their sync API a few years ago, presumably because it gave away their core functionality.

Some options that I see so far: - Use Dropbox API webhooks to be notified of file changes, then do the syncing logic myself (using s3 for persistence and postgres for file metadata) - Write my own custom sync logic for all platforms that I want to support - Try to shoe horn an open source sync lib onto the platforms I want to support. Eg Syncthing is written in Go which could theoretically get running in iOS

For option 1 my concern is that I still have to write plenty of sync logic server side, why not go the extra step and implement the client(s). I am also beholden your the API in a few ways: 1) They could end their service, 2) All my users have to have an account with them, 3) My cache of files is a bit of a 3rd class citizen as it will be last to get change notifications.

My concern with option two (write it myself) is simply that it’s a lot of work. Although it would be fun work to do, it’s still a distraction from everything else core to my service.

Option 3 seems doable but potentially a misadventure of working against the grain of the library (assuming I can find one to rework to my needs)

  👤 thatonewhere Accepted Answer ✓
To add a little more context, my service needs to have access to all the users files and maintain folder structure. Then apply some transformations on those files, for example convert HEIC files to jpeg and that sort of thing.

Technically I don’t have to support all file types but from my understanding most sync logic works on binary diff anyways so it isn’t much of a shorty cut.