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Suggestion for Bulk Upload and Download API
Currently, if i were to upload or download 100+ to 1000+ files to/from Dropbox, one have to call upload and download for each file. Also, such upload and download are not compressed (not supported in api.dropbox.com's HTTP header.
I think Dropbox would benefit many if it supports a bulk upload and download capability with compression. Imagine one can upload a zip file that contains multiple files and folders, when complete, simply ask Dropbox to expand the zip file. Similarly, provide a list of files and folders to Dropbox, and ask to zip and download to local.
Dropbox's native application can do upload / download multiple times faster than the API upload/download, I would bet that Dropbox has that functions but keep it to themselves. Also, I think Dropbox perform de-duplicaton locally and remotely to avoid some of the unnecessary upload or download, i.e., it can simple replicate locally or remotely during synchronisation.
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It can deduplicate as it keeps track of all of the chunks of files it has for deduplication. You dont so you cant.
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Community Moderator
Thanks for posting! I'm sending these along as feature requests.
Great! I would love to see them soon. Would be great if you can offer "compression - gzip" upload and download thru the API, and bulk upload/download in compression mode.
I think zipping up files is a bad idea since files can be added, deleted, or renamed at any time.
Are you under the impression that text and log files are not already compressed during transmission? I just tested with a 200MB text file, and the amount of network activity was much smaller than the amount of disk that was being read. This is indicative of compression occurring on a per file basis. Compression might make sense for text files, but not for archives, images, and videos. It just adds an unnecessary CPU overhead.
Sun, just curious, which API did you test it on?
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