When will online-only files work on Linux?

I've been using cloud storage services only for small documents mainly because I don't feel quite satisfied with the speed of Rclone. Then I discovered the Dropbox client for Linux, which can utilise my full bandwidth almost all the time. So naturally I started considering subscribing to Dropbox so that I can move some of my photos and videos from my local NAS to Dropbox however the disk usage then certainly became a concern. I haven't got several teras just lurking around in my laptop and Selective Sync is obviously not an optimal solution.

Since this feature has already been implemented on Windows and macOS so I guess to bring it to Linux, it won't even require much change on the server side, only on the client side. Come on, Dropbox, just one step away from winning me over :)

Same here. I don't really need SmartSync. Selective Sync works, and that is more than enough for me. Currently, my Dropbox contains nearly 400 GB of data in over 23,000 folders and 462,000 files, but my 2TB drives are sufficient for this.

Soon, I anticipate needing to write much larger numbers of files while doing molecular dynamics simulations, but I can offload these to auxiliary backup disks.

Nevetheless, I have been relying on Dropbox for years to keep my 6 Linux and 7 Windows machines syncronized between two offices, and I certainly hope they do not abandon linux support.

I certainly hope that they don't, but when their official position is that they don't feel it is important to add features they advertise to paid customers... I've seen this movie before, it leads to deprecation of their Linux client over time as it gradually loses feature parity with other operating systems until it gets so bad that they just abandon the Linux client entirely.

To be frank, I don't even need smart sync since my Linux computer has a giant hard drive and can sync everything. But I would rather jump ship while their client still works reasonably well and give my money to a company that will actually put it towards supporting Linux.

Personally, I haven't decided what to switch to yet. But there are many good options in this thread. I might give Keybase a shot, they do "file streaming" only so it looks like it's smart sync by default. Plus open source and end-to-end encryption. But less mature and I don't really want excitement in my inter-computer file sharing.

https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs

It would be a disaster for me if Dropbox were to stop supporting linux altogether. Although it would be ideal if the linux version of Dropbox included all the features available in the Mac and Windows versions, the current status for the linux version is far better (for me at least) than having no linux version at all.

You are welcome for sharing our thoughts.

Thank you Daphne for clarifying that Dropbox does not want business from Linux users.

Thank you more to everyone who posted alternative companies to give money to.

Sounds like we all have our answer. Don't be surprised if Dropbox just stops supporting Linux at all in the near future.

Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts on this idea here!

While we can't take every idea forward, we do regularly re-review and will update you if anything changes.

Thanks again!

Give me smart sync on Linux or I'm switching to Google Drive. Dropbox, you're losing out on paid users because you aren't actively supporting a platform that you offer service for. If you market a feature, make sure I can use it. Thanks.

+1 for rclone solution pointed out by Jamesernator (thanks!). 

I tried it and it seems to work nicely.

I think I'll use it, together with selective sync for most used dir. 

At least, while waiting for smart sync feature for Linux! 

For anyone wanting to have something like smart sync (e.g. a mounted point that only loads files as neccessary) there is the option of using rclone . This is a tool that supports multiple remote file systems and has lots of utilities for interacting with them.

In particular you can use "rclone mount" to mount your dropbox to some folder.

For example:

mkdir ~/dropbox
rclone mount dropbox:/ ~/dropbox

Will allow you to access your dropbox remote via the folder ~/dropbox .

Now there's a few options we'll want:

--dir-cache-time 30s # Ensures entering a folder that was really recently entered doesn't need reload time
--cache-dir ~/.rclone-cache-dir/ # Allows files to be cached instead of being loaded every time
--vfs-cache-max-age 24h # Allows you to set time files will be kept in cache until they're removed from disk, configure to whatever you want
--vfs-cache-max-size 2G # Allows you to set how much space will be used for cache, configure to whatever you want
--vfs-cache-mode full # Ensures writes and reads are buffered to disk before sync

Now this gives a pretty good mounted fs however unfortunately this will not mount automatically on login.

In order to get it working on startup we can use systemd to configure session start tasks.

So create file:

~/.config/systemd/user/rclone-mount-dropbox.service

Now in this file we'll add our startup config:

[Unit]
Description=Rclone Dropbox
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
TimeoutStartSec=60
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p /home/<username>/dropbox
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount dropbox:/ /home/<username>/dropbox --dir-cache-time 30s --cache-dir /home/<username>/.rclone-mount-cache/ --vfs-cache-max-age 24h0m0s --vfs-cache-mode full --vfs-cache-max-size 2G
ExecStop=-/usr/bin/fusermount -u /home/<username>/dropbox
Restart=on-abort

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Configure the options for the cache however you want. Make sure to change /home/<username> to whatever your home directory in all places it appears in the command.

Now to add the service to run automatically:

systemctl --user enable rclone-mount-dropbox.service

And that's it, restart your computer (or start the service with systemctl) and voila you have a mounted dropbox in your home directory.