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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

#201

Post by thomasfedb »

xigma wrote: post #53
thomasfedb wrote: post #10

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…

Fair point - I'd be fairly confident that it's Ubuntu at least on the desktop, based on experience the data I've glanced at previously. But I could be mistaken.

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

#202

Post by batbomb »

laumars wrote: post #131
rayiner wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not talking about FTP, which isn’t a network file system. I’m talking about NFS, AFS, and sucessors in that line of development. E.g. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system . I’m literally talking about the theory of the paper by Richard Gabriel ( https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html ) which is that worse solutions often win because it takes too much time to bring a good solution…

In that case it might have been helpful if you stated that you were shifting the context away from FTP; as was the context in the GPs comment. ;) NFS and AFS (from what limited I know of it) are more designed for local networks thus to leverage NFS over a WAN you'd then need to tunnel your connection (eg via SSH or VPN). So while there is obviously overlap between them and Dropbox I wouldn't really say the two are al…

AFS works fine over a WAN. Sometimes a little slow on metadata operations.

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

#203

Post by crankylinuxuser »

OskarS wrote: post #91
vxNsr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is probably about cutting out the big data users. They don't even offer an unlimited plan, but they probably noticed that certain linux users were using most of their 2tb plans while everyone else wasn't. Lose the most active users, keep the ones paying for something they don't need.

Dropbox for Business is unlimited, isn't it?

No service is "unlimited". Its a marketing lie.

Why? Because there's always exceptions for 'abuse of service' and other exemptions.

The only time something is unlimited is if you do it yourself. Then you only have yourself to lean on.

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

#204

Post by krylon »

pjc50 wrote: post #135
rayiner wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There has never been a network file system that really worked for this use case - detached operation by average users. The nearest we ever got was WebDAV.

I thought AndrewFS was supposed to cover that case. But I have to admit I never saw it in action, so this is hearsay at best.

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

#205

Post by enzolovesbacon »

WallWextra wrote: post #12

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?

"dead in the water" is incorrect. SUSE's SLES (I believe OpenSUSE as well) uses btrfs on root and XFS on home for default install. And SUSE systems are very far from "dead in the water" as it's employed in lots of big servers around the globe.

Just because Red Hat marked btrfs deprecated on their systems, doesn't mean the technology itself is deprecated.

Also, from what I've read, they deprecated it because of resources issues rather than tech issues (seems like they had 0 btrfs devs and lots of XFS specialists on the team).

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

#206

Post by Fnoord »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #160
laumars wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case it might have been helpful if you stated that you were shifting the context away from FTP; as was the context in the GPs comment. ;) NFS and AFS (from what limited I know of it) are more designed for local networks thus to leverage NFS over a WAN you'd then need to tunnel your connection (eg via SSH or VPN). So while there is obviously overlap between them and Dropbox I wouldn't really say the two are al…

>you'd then need to tunnel your connection (eg via SSH or VPN) Well, there is an sshfs FUSE filesystem, for what it's worth

Which works on Windows via Dokan [1]

[1] https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokan-sshfs

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

#207

Post by otterpro »

mixedCase wrote: post #26

For people looking to move to a service that supports Linux as a first class citizen: Mega works well enough as far as syncing files goes.

I had used Mega since it was introduced, and I had recommended it before with its generous 50GB free space and Linux support. However, Mega had become unreliable about a year ago, when it started to delete files after bad syncs. Be very careful about putting important files. Also sometimes, upload speed is very slow (took me over a minute to upload 120k file) and the sync on the iOS became really bad - it always get stuck on "Downloading...", but fails to sync. I hope they fix the problems, but until then, I've decided not to use it.

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

#208

Post by amyjess »

vetinari wrote: post #165
pjc50 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I (and I suspect quite a few other people) want a cloud backend to cover both the disaster-recovery cases and syncing while outside my LAN.

1) you can sync with a device inside your LAN, even if you are outside, with global discovery (enabled by default). 2) you can run your own off-site instance, that can be hosted with your favourite cloud provider.

> you can run your own off-site instance, that can be hosted with your favourite cloud provider.

How much would it cost to hire an admin to set up and maintain that instance?

The whole point of Dropbox is that I don't have to do any work.

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

#209

Post by dang »

mopsled wrote: post #11

Here is a direct link to the response from Dropbox: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Syncing-and-uploads/Linux-Dr...

Thanks, we've changed to that from https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Syncing-and-uploads/Linux-Dr....

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

#210

Post by ahnick »

skrebbel wrote: post #200
ahnick wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. I'm not sure why someone would choose Dropbox over Keybase nowadays.

Continuity? I mean, does Keybase have a business model yet? Or is it still "$bigshot_vc who is friends with the CEO believes a few crypto/security gambles are in order"? Not meant critically, I love that they exist and found funding. It's just, as long as the model is "once the privacy shit hits the fan in some widely published scandal, we'll be the one that's ahead" there's only two outcomes: 1. It doesn't happen so…

My understanding is they are focused on user growth and improving the UX right now. Also, I believe they could be sustainable without being as widely popular as dropbox. IIRC eventually they will have a paid tier for their kbfs solution. I know I would certainly pay. For me Keybase is a one stop shop: identity management, individual and team chat, encrypted git repos, and secure file sharing all on a cross-platform system. No one really offers the service they do.
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