FileMetadata checksum

[Joel T.9]

Is there something better than file size to use as a checksum?

Maybe Sha1 or MD5? I didn't see one on the FileMetadata class. It appears "Rev" changes even when the contents haven't changed (ie. on file rename)

[Greg-DB]

The Dropbox API doesn't offer any sort of file hash or checksum unfortunately, but I'll be sure to pass this along as a feature request.

[Joel T.9]

That would be great, "file size" is the only item that appears to be correlated with the actual content, please correct me if I'm wrong, even date changes simply on file name change.

[Greg-DB]

Yes, even the date would change. The file size will always indicate the size of the file contents, though we don't recommend using that as a way to identify the actual contents of course.

[Brian S.53]

What do you recommend for identifying changes to the actual file contents?

[Joel T.9]

For the time being, I'm fetching the file and calculating the MD5 myself. I'm hoping Dropbox will allow access to the checksum they are already calculating, and I'll just replace with that... Hopefully they will give us access (and it's not a different algorithm).

[Brian S.53]

So there's no way around needing to download the entire file just to see if it's the same as the local copy?

[Greg-DB]

Hi Brian, I just replied on the new thread you started, but in short, yes, that's correct, the Dropbox API doesn't currently offer file hashes, so you'd need to download it to check the contents.

[Olaf B.2]

Any news on this? Can we hope to see md5sum among the API methods some time soon?

[Greg-DB]

Apologies, no news on this. I'm not aware of plans for this.