Here is a direct link to the response from Dropbox: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Syncing-and-uploads/Linux-Dr...
Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
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Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#12It's a shame that btrfs seems to be dead in the water. I guess nobody with the resources to build such a filesystem actually needs its snapshotting and integrity features at the filesystem level?
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#13It's not encrypted ext4, it's ecryptfs (which acts as a separate layer entirely, creating a virtual encrypted filesystem on top of ext4) - probably doesn't support some inotify feature or some extended attributes that aren't set correctly when used through ecryptfs. If instead you used dmcrypt and encrypted the whole device or partition you'd probably have no issue as it looks just like any other EXT4 FS to the syste…
The (supposed) Dropbox engineer refers to Extended Attributes.
Maybe they’re doing uncommon stuff with ’em that uncommon filesystems cannot cope with... ;)
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#14So, what's the reason? I can't see it on the linked page. I would have thought that dropbox functionality is totally filesystem independent. I can't think of a reason why they'd do this.
EDIT: Found it.
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#15No problem, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
Just in case anyone doesn't recognize this quote, it is from the 2007 hacker news post about Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#16No problem, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
Or just use Google Drive
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#17No problem, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
Reference for the uninitiated:
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#18TL;DR:
Dropbox tells with a very unhelpful popup: "Move Dropbox location - Dropbox will stop syncing in November".
And on the forums, dropboxer Jay precises that starting Nov. 7, 2018, they're limiting support to Windows / NTFS, macOS / HFS+ & APFS, linux/Ext4. They say missing X-attrs support is what guides dropping other fs.
They didn't answer yet if displaying this message to users of common-through-Ubuntu Ext4+ecryptfs is intentional.
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#19No problem, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
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Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#20Is this a new business opportunity?
Probably not as such users are just a vocal minority, and probably not enough to use as a consumer group.