Curiousity may have killed the cat but it has been a huge asset in my IT career. Problems are often solved by spotting a tiny detail which gives a clue to the issue or opens a new method for solving it.

One of my current IT tasks is getting the contents of my Dropbox folder onto my new laptop. I use Dropbox as another level of protection for things like my music collection and, consequently, have quite a large repository of files. It was crawling along and then I spotted the LAN sync option under network preferences. If Dropbox finds another host machine for the same repository on a local network, it will copy the files directly from one to another rather than via its own servers, which gives a huge speed boost.

Aha! That must have explained why I seemed to get a speed hike when I had both machines switched on in the morning. A further test, temporarily turning off the default limit on upload speed on the original machine, and the prospect of days worth of downloads has now compressed down so that I have less than an hour left. I’ll have to remember to turn uploads back to automatic throttling (the default, which probably prevents too much of a performance / bandwidth hit in the normal course of affairs) but again my curiousity has served me well.