A Performance Evaluation of Dropbox in the light of Personal Cloud Storage Systems

Personal cloud storage services have attracted the attention of users thanks to this great accessibility. Personal cloud storage services allow users to synchronize their local files with the servers in the cloud in order to make them accessible from anywhere, on any device, and at any time thanks to the client applications provided by the vendors. Various experiments are evaluated on Dropbox, one of the most popular personal cloud storage services, in order to reveal how they affect the performances of file operations such as downloading files from the cloud storage, uploading files to the cloud storage, and deleting files from the cloud storage. The experimental results are discussed with revealing the insights about how the file operations are performed on Dropbox. Also, we discuss the several techniques and architectural design principles provided by Dropbox in order to improve the file synchronization performance in terms of required time and stability. Even though we focus on Dropbox, the proposed study gives an idea about the architecture of personal cloud storage services in general and how can they be improved in terms of performance, security, and usability. We conclude the paper with discussing the features to evaluate personal cloud storage services.