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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

#21

Their reasoning of "you need a filesystem which supports extended attributes" sounds legit. Time for some of us to start work on adding extended attributes to more filesystems?

I believe all 3 filesystems have support for extended attributes, so it doesn't seem legit.

Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems

#22

It'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…

> "It'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."

Thanks, I updated the title.

Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems

#23
This sounds fine to me. Ya'll are making sound like they're refuseing to sync because the FS is encryped. The file systems mentioned are really old. You can use newer FS's that are encrypted. They need to support extended attributes for obvious reasons.

Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems

#24

The kicker is in the couching - dropping support for "uncommon filesystems" - of which their definition includes the default filesystem used by the most popular distro. Just dumb or wilfully ignorant?

I'd bet that by Dropbox's user metrics "the most popular distro" still qualifies as "uncommon" for a Dropbox client. Despite being the year of desktop Linux, non-server Linux boxes are comparatively rare.

That said, Ext4 is still supported, just not with encryption.

Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems

#25

The kicker is in the couching - dropping support for "uncommon filesystems" - of which their definition includes the default filesystem used by the most popular distro. Just dumb or wilfully ignorant?

Maybe they mean uncommon amongst their userbase.

Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems

#27

It'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?

Does ZFS gaining steam on Linux in recent years have anything to do with the state of btrfs?

Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems

#28
post #23

This sounds fine to me. Ya'll are making sound like they're refuseing to sync because the FS is encryped. The file systems mentioned are really old. You can use newer FS's that are encrypted. They need to support extended attributes for obvious reasons.

btrfs is "really old" compared to ext4? Default setups of major distros are not worth supporting?

Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems

#30
post #3

Seeing how an encrypted home directory is as good as the default option in Ubuntu, and seeing as it already works now , this seems like a dumb move. This is a shame because I just started using Dropbox significantly more to back up shared photos. Time to search for something else, I guess.

Not in the latest Ubuntu installs. They do FDE instead of home folder encryption.
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