Why doesn't DropBox just stop doing de-duplication? They must have the money for the storage? The bandwidth savings for users isn't that big of a deal in most cases. I expect that if I have a 2GB file that I'm uploading a 2GB file. I don't cross my fingers that you already have big chunks of it.
This just seems like the type of thing that someone much smarter than I can and will exploit in the future.
Dropbox provides lots of storage for free. Therefore they have a strong incentive to provide this free storage at the lowest possible cost, and deduplication definitely makes sense for themselves if not the users.
This just seems like the type of thing that someone much smarter than I can and will exploit in the future.