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

dropboxforum.com

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

#52

No 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.

In case anyone is wondering if there truly is something like Dropbox (delta sync, desktop app, mobile app, web interface, ...): There is. It’s Seafile. The Docker image is reasonably easy to set up and run.

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

#53

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?

Honest question, what do you believe is "the most popular distro"? Professionally, I have never seen a BTRFS deployment, nor any of the distros commonly at the top of Distrowatch (Manjaro, Mint, Elementary...).

With the fragmentation of Linux, even the "most popular" distro may hold a tiny market share. The guys at dropbox probably know far more about their users than what is reflected in some arbitrary popularity contest, so I doubt it's either ignorance or stupidity that led them to this decision.

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

#54
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.

ext4: October 2008 btrfs: March 2009 ecryptfs: May 2016 xfs: 2002

Which one of these are old?

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

#55

No 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

Sorry, Google Drive doesn't support Linux.

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

#56
post #42

No 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.

The modern alternative is probably Syncthing. I intermittently maintain a list of these things at https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... ; none of them have ever been precisely what I wanted. The cheap alternative to Dropbox with Linux support you want was "Hubic" from OVH (edit: now discontinued)

How about Keybase? It has a pretty seamless files experience, I find. Open source, end-to-end encryption, Windows client, painless sync, free for 250GB...

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

#57
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s a really great example of worse is better.[1] We went from sophisticated network file system to a daemon that destroys your battery life (at least on Mac) watching for file changes in a directory. [1] https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

Don't know what you're talking about. Dropbox doesn't ruin my battery on my Mac.

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

#58
post #53

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?

Honest question, what do you believe is "the most popular distro"? Professionally, I have never seen a BTRFS deployment, nor any of the distros commonly at the top of Distrowatch (Manjaro, Mint, Elementary...). With the fragmentation of Linux, even the "most popular" distro may hold a tiny market share. The guys at dropbox probably know far more about their users than what is reflected in some arbitrary popularity co…

Ubuntu uses ext4 and the default is to ecryptfs the user's homedir.

Edit: Actually I can't find that it was ever the default, but it was a pretty prominent option so I assume this decision is going to mess with a ton of customers.

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

#59
Excluding XFS is an odd choice as it's very common in the server world.

I'm assuming encryptfs-ext4 has some attribute issue that prevents them for doing efficient deltas. That aside, what's the use case for encryptfs at all? Isn't it strictly worse than LUKS on the underlying volume or a volume file mounted via loopback?

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

#60
post #51

Dropbox isn't even the cheapest or best file syncing service, they're basically all a commodity at this point and if they don't want you as customers... just go elsewhere.

Would you kindly provide recommendations? I'm looking for a sync service which can run on windows AND linux (which is why onedrive and google drive are out)...and i'm willing to pay a fair monthly fee.
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