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Forum Discussion
How can I make files online-only on Ubuntu?
Dear all
Recently, I moved from Windows 11 to Ubuntu 24.04 in my laptop. During my journey in Windows, I was always very pleased with the integration between Dropbox and my operating system, as I could browse all the folders in my Dropbox account locally on my laptop without having to go to the web browser, even those that were not synced to my computer (i.e. I could access the folders not downloaded to my computer, see the file names... and when I double-clicked on a file, it would be downloaded to my computer and I could access it quickly and easily).
When I downloaded and synced Dropbox with Ubuntu on my laptop, all the files and folders in my Dropbox account started to store a copy locally on my computer. For those folders that took up a lot of space and that I wasn't going to use at the moment, I right-clicked on them and checked the option to not sync with dropbox.com. However, this did not have the effect of clearing the space that these folders were taking up, with the desired functionality of being able to browse my laptop locally and see their names and be able to access them even if they weren't synced.
I was wondering if there was a way to mimic this functionality that I enjoyed on Windows.
4 Replies
- Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hi rimaroa, thanks for messaging the Community!
The option to mark files and folders as online-only isn't currently available on Linux OS systems.
This means that by default, all files would be made available locally on Linux. If you wish, you can use selective sync to prevent entire folders from syncing to your machine.
If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.
We are moving more of our systems to Ubuntu and really could use the "online only" sync function as well.
