Question

just recently I was thinking and wondered, how does Dropbox upload my files to its S3 storage and how might that one be organized?

Let’s just completely forget about the sync aspect for a second and scale the problem down to one S3 bucket.

Say, in that bucket’s root directory you have lots of folders, each belonging to an arbitrary user.

Now if that user wants to upload a file to his folder… how does that happen internally? I mean, Dropbox can’t just store the Amazon S3 access credentials/keys hard-coded into the application (be it on ios or windows) as it might get reverse-engineered and thus exposed.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

In the same way websites don’t allow users to directly access their databases but rather provide interfaces that can control permissions and handle authentication, I’m sure Dropbox has some kind of application that the client on your computer interacts with. Their server daemon will have permissions to write to the disk, but your computer has to go through it (and it’s security procedures) before anything your computer sends is written.