Dropbox and the Dropbox logo are trademarks of Dropbox, Inc.

What's Dropbox?

"One place for all your stuff, wherever you are."

Dropbox is a home for all your photos, docs, videos, and files. Anything you add to Dropbox will automatically show up on all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website — so you can access your stuff from anywhere.

Dropbox also makes it super easy to share with others, whether you're a student or professional, parent or grandparent. Even if you accidentally spill a latte on your laptop, have no fear! Relax knowing that your stuff is safe in Dropbox and will never be lost.

Dropbox provides an online storage solution powered by cloud computing service model of software as a service (SaaS). Dropbox users are provided by an online storage space hosted on Dropbox accessible anywhere via the Internet. The storage space provides storage for virtually any kind of fie type from documents, images, videos etc.
 

Dropbox works by installing an application on client system, which immediately uploads the data to their own cloud storage servers. The uploaded data can be accessed from the installed application or through an online control panel.
Dropbox file sharing works in cohesion with file synchronization which keeps the file routinely updated across all shared nodes even if it’s shared among many people, therefore every single recipient will always receive the latest version of the file.

History

• Dropbox founder Drew Houston developed the Dropbox concept after repeatedly forgetting his USB flash drive while he was a student at MIT. 
• He said that existing services at the time "suffered problems with Internet latency, large files, bugs, or just made me think too much."
• In 2007 Dropbox secured seed funding from Y Combinator.
• Dropbox was officially launched at 2008's TechCrunch50, an annual technology conference.
• On November 12, 2012, Dropbox announced it had reached 100 million users.

• File sharing
• Automatic organization & back-up
• Any device accessibility
• File storage
• Preview & download
• Automatic updates
• Large file sharing
• Simple link-sharing via email, chat or text message
• Online back-up & file recovery
• 256-bit AES encryption security
• Offline access
• Revision Support
• Multi platform & OS support
• Rich API

Features

Dropbox Basic:

Price: $0

Storage upto 2GB (plus earned)

Dropbox Pro:

Price: $9.99 / month

Storage upto 1 TB (1,000 GB) of space

Passwords and expirations for links

Remote wipe

Dropbox for Business:

Price: $15 / user / month

Storage more than 1 TB

Team sharing controls

Pricing

Dropbox uses more than uses more than 10,000 physical servers to manage user content, along with Amazon Web Services. User metadata is stored in the company’s data centers, while the actual files reside on Amazon’s S3 storage service.

Infrastructure

stores account information and file metadata

stores the actual user files

(block info doesn't exists in the database)

(block info does exists in the database)

non-streaming sync

streaming sync

(for large files)

Comparison

Every file in Dropbox is partitioned into 4MB blocks, with the final block potentially being smaller. These blocks are hashed with SHA-256 and stored. A file’s contents can be uniquely identified by this list of SHA-256 hashes, which we refer to as a ‘blocklist’.

Dropbox File Format

And the best-specced cloud storage client is ...

• Dropbox is most pleasurable storage cloud for the old in-out
  (http://m.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/27/cloud_storage_benchmarks/)
• Dropbox Tech Blog
  (https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/)
• AWS re:Invent (2014) Conference
• Talk on Dropbox's scaling by Kevin Modzelewski at Stanford

References