Dropbx - Maestral

[manyroads]

I have stumbled across a light weight Dropbox client (Open source Python) that seems to work. Interestingly it uses only 94MB of RAM versus Dropbox's typical 890MB (on my system). Here's info on the software (be aware the software has progressed from 2019).

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/07/m ... opbox.html

EDIT: I forgot to add the github info:
https://github.com/samschott/maestral

[Jerry3904]

Did you also happen to stumble upon the USD 120 it now costs?

[manyroads]

I'm using it at no-cost. I did not do anything special... but then my mom always said I was special. I'm using just the client component on Linux.

[Stevo]

Wait...where's that? Maestral or Dropbox has that fee?

[manyroads]

@stevo Dropbox always has a fee unless you can live with their tiny free space allotment.
Maestral is without a fee so far as I know. Maestral seems to be a nice drop-in client for dropbox that is without memory leaks and runs quite skinny (in comparison).

[richb]

I do not undertand. Maestral is a dropbox client which means to me it accesses Dropbox. So you still need a Dropbox account. What am I missing?

[manyroads]

@richb Dropbox consists of two major components...

1. Dropbox server side (@Jerry3904 $120 annual cost) and
2. Client side which links your desktop/ phone/ etc to the server.

In native Dropbox on Linux & MAC, the native Dropbox client suffers memory leaks and is a resource hog. You can run Maestral (and probably some others) as a non-Dropbox client. Maestral is typically 7 (seven) times less resource intensive. Maestral is opensource and comes at no cost. All that needs to be done is install the 'replacement client' and link it to your server account (a trivial task on Maestral).

From that point forward everything works faster, lighter, and more stable on MAC and Linux. My testing, thus far, is showing very good results on MX Linux 21and PeppermintOS11.

FWIW. Maestral's systray icons also work well; where Droxbox icons do not work universally across Linux.

[richb]

The Dropbox clienrt works perfectly for me. The only drawback is slow speed transfers to Dropbox.

[manyroads]

FWIW. I have been moving between wm and the icons for Maestral work differently but more reliably than those in the Dropbox client. The icon image changes completely to a recycle like circle when syncing. It returns to the Maestral wave icon when syncing is complete. Sync times with Maestral run noticeably faster that those of the Dropbox client (so far) (my 800GB synced yesterday in under 2 hours, compared to a my typical 6-8 hours sync when using Drobox-client). It will take awhile before I notice if there any errors. I have to note that I have not found any mention of such on the web (so I'm pretty confident that the past three years of operation on both MAC and Linux are an indicator of stability). But as always, I'll try to "trust but verify..."

[richb]

I will try Maestral for the speed increase. That woud be a big plus.