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Forum Discussion
Are file ids globally unique?
The documentation doesn't say anything about file ids being unique at all, whereas this blog post leads me to believe they're unique per user, but not necessarily globally unique. Are file ids globally unique?
Thank you!
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Apologies we don't have better documentation on this right now! I'll send this along as a request for some.
To answer your actual question though, there are a few things to note:
- file IDs are not content hashes. That is, files with the same exact content in two unrelated accounts will have different IDs.
- a single file in a shared folder with multiple users will be report the same file ID when requested via any one of the different members of the shared folder.
- Greg-DB
No, in that case they would have distinct IDs.
Sorry, the documentation does contain the language "A unique identifier for the file".
However, the global uniqueness is still ambiguous.
Gregory, Thank you very much for your reply. I understand that a single file in a shared folder with multiple users will report the same file ID for each user. My question is: is it possible for two different files with different content in two unrelated accounts to have the same file id?
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