Question

I am doing a dropbox-like sync tool using the dropbox API, some changed files are going to be synced to the dropbox server. Then, my question is how I can detect the modification of the sync folder, even after I quit the dropbox application, I may need to record the modifications and do an automatic sync after loginning dropbox again. I think scan the whole file tree each time at dropbox startup is of low efficiency. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

if you know what files can be changed you can store its link somewhere in your application and when you will run it you just take that link, add authorization and check file metadata. But if you want to check whole folder, in order to do that you need to traverse it. There is no other option unfortunatelly.

And don’t forget to use hash parameter when you will be traversing some folders. You can store hash value for each particular file/folder when you getting metadata at first time, and put it as a request parameter to each individual file or folder at futher requests, so you decrease amount of json response significantly.