Time to drop Dropbox?

[Adrian]

Beginning October 15, Dropbox is ending support for Ubuntu 13.10 and below, and Fedora 20 and below. You must be using glibc 2.19 or higher to continue using the Dropbox desktop application. Please update to a supported Linux operating system (Ubuntu 14.04+ or Fedora 21+) or meet the new system requirements.

As of November 7, the Dropbox desktop app for Linux will only support the ext4 file system. Dropbox will continue to sync with supported file systems that are encrypted via full disk encryption (e.g. LUKS). Please note that ecryptfs is not supported. To ensure your files continue to sync, your Dropbox folder will need to be on a hard drive or partition that meets the new file system requirements.

[timkb4cq]

MX-15 runs glibc 2.19-18 and ext4 is the most common fs type.
I'm sure there are users who will be annoyed that their particular configuration is not supported - but that's true of almost any webservice.

[Adrian]

What bothers me is ext4 limitation and also doesn't support encryptfs which we offer as an option for /home encryption.

[chrispop99]

Dropbox is essential to me; I pay for extra space, and I can't see the changes they are making will impact on me at all, so I see no need to drop it.

Chris

[Jerry3904]

Same here

[Adrian]

Well, I have btrfs on one machine and a test /home encryption on other, even if I didn't want to drop it I won't be able to use it anymore.

I understand the competing mind-frames: "it doesn't particularly affect me therefore it means it's perfectly fine what they are doing" vs. "it affects me therefore whatever they are doing is wrong", I guess I'm on the other side of the fence on this one.

[timkb4cq]

Use a private service, you accept their restrictions. There are other choices if you don't like their terms.
https://www.fossmint.com/dropbox-altern ... for-linux/
Choice is good.

[Richard]

I didn't think we actually have a desktop app?
I suppose they mean the little icon app in the task bar.

For other filesystems, symlinks to a supported partition work for me to ntfs on netbooks where I had to maintain compatibility and access via Win98 of all things. It is a bother to have to adjust.
They offer the source to build in support for Nautilus, perhaps for the task bar applet?

If we only have the CLI version, it won't be hard to make a few scripts to do the sync and such.
There's already this script from Dropbox. Here are the current, available commands:

Code: Select all

$ dropbox.py 
Dropbox command-line interface commands:

Note: use dropbox help <command> to view usage for a specific command.

 status       get current status of the dropboxd
 throttle     set bandwidth limits for Dropbox
 help         provide help
 stop         stop dropboxd
 running      return whether dropbox is running
 start        start dropboxd
 filestatus   get current sync status of one or more files
 ls           list directory contents with current sync status
 autostart    automatically start dropbox at login
 exclude      ignores/excludes a directory from syncing
 lansync      enables or disables LAN sync
 sharelink    get a shared link for a file in your dropbox
 proxy        set proxy settings for Dropbox

richard@mx171:~
$ 

[KBD]

Thankfully it doesn't affect me. There are not many good options for free cloud back up on Linux that will also sync. I use Dropbox for a few active documents across my Linux installs, and Pcloud for back up.

[Adrian]

Oh, cute, I'm traveling, I wanted to put my dev folders from Dropbox on a live USB, guess what message I got "Move Dropbox folder on a supported file system" So Dropbox won't work (well, or at all) on Live MX...

Does anybody have a good suggesting for a replacement of Dropbox? Google Drive doesn't really cut it for me because it doesn't have a native client, I tried one of the existing 3rd party clients and it doesn't work well and specifically it doesn't work well for development for Linux because it ignores file attributes (so if a file is marked as executable it might lose that attribute on Google Drive). I would prefer a cross-platform solution that does work on other file systems not like the new Dropbox.