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I really wish all the Dropbox clients on a LAN would coordinate and not all download the same file from Dropbox.

We had our three work machines all downloading a ~400MB file the other day. No reason Dropbox couldn't figure that out and have one machine download the file and then distribute over LAN.

"No reason Dropbox couldn't figure that out and have one machine download the file and then distribute over LAN."

They could have each machine download a chunk and have them swap chunks locally. That would asymptote in time towards a single download.

That would handle cases of the "one" machine going offline close to the end, or having it being the slowest machine available.

That's a great idea to handle those sorts of edge cases.

In other words, a slightly more managed Bit Torrent.

I tried BTSync and was blown away by how much faster sync in general and especially LAN sync was. I guess Bittorrent Inc. knows how to properly transfer files.

It's also available on AeroFS, and it actually works much better on AeroFS. (I still prefer Dropbox to AeroFS because Dropbox is more reliable.)

BTSync has it as well.

Spideroak does LAN sync as well