About Oliver F.6

Hi,   not sure if this will help somebody, but it seems you can use (free, open source) Rclone ( https://rclone.org/ ) which can "mount" Dropbox as virtual filesystem. It can't do two-way sync and things like that, but at least it might help in the migration period over to another service. It can also copy between different cloud services.   I'll use it to access pCloud from my ARM based devices . ... View more

I don't think many technicians were involved in this decision.   They were probably just asked - what eats most of your time, how can we cut down cost, maybe even reduce employees? And of course, that's QA on the various different Linux distros. So someone higher up decided it's best to limit things to one filesystem.   I wonder if they will really save from this, as (some) people will now try to mix Linux distros with file systems with which they do not ship by default. And then Dropbox is still used on many distros - ang QA will still be hard. Limiting by filesystem seems like a decision without technical knowledge to me. Probably someone from development was asked to produce a plot, how many filesystems are used out there - and they just picked the bin which was filled highest.   On the other hand, Dropbox stocks are slowly going down - not yet at their all time low, but maybe this is something that they will feel. But probably they will ignore this for now, since they expect QA cost to go down.   I'm now with pCloud, in case anybody wants to follow, I'd of course be grateful if you use my invite link to follow: <<referral links are not permitted>> They offer up to 20 GB of free space, sometimes do promotions (as Dropbox did in the past!), you can choose to Sync a folder or keep things only in the cloud (like selective sync on demand) by using a virtual filesystem. And - you can access your data via WebDAV! So yeah, even if Dropbox is still more clever in reducing bandwidth (chunked uploads of multiple files, clever change detection, account-wide deduplication) and have a lot of apps using their API, it appears they have become too large to do technical decisions. ... View more

@Mark You are probably right. I myself am also not a paying customer, but I have recommended Dropbox to many people, and I'm pretty sure some of them pay. Dropbox will lose me, but that will effectively gain them some resources. Of course, they will lose one person advertising their services. But this does not really show up in any financial statistics.   It would be interesting to see some statistics how their storage usage and number of connections are going down, though - too bad these kind of statistics are only internal. In any case, they will only see delayed storage effects due to the rollback functionality . Probably we "expert linux users" are mainly users with free accounts, only costing them money, so the rationale to slowly reduce Linux support and maybe at some point drop it might be reasonable to a marketing guy...   That's very different from the fresh startup tech company with cool implementations 10 years ago, but oh well, this is how things develop if they become large.   ... View more

I've also just got the mail that I should move my Dropbox folder to a modern filesystem "ext4". Have migrated away from that quite some years ago, to btrfs.   I think that indeed it's true that Dropbox did never retreat from such an announced decision. The only thing all paying customers can do now is complain, and ask for a refund. Dropbox stocks are already on a slow downward trend, maybe the higher ups at Dropbox will realize the impact of their decision if money flows back to the customers by them asking for refunds. That's the only chance we have to get across through the PR department. ... View more

@Darren S.1  schrieb: I've also found you can access your account via WebDAV - something which Dropbox has been resisting for years. This just made my day! I was trying to figure out a way to use pCloud from other apps on Android, e.g. Total Commander, and was sad not to find any plugin. But with WebDAV it works . ... View more

@metabubble  schrieb: TBF someone who makes use of snapshots and deduplication won't have a problem to either - create a new btrfs subvolume that is excluded from snapshots - shrink the partition and create a new one - shrink the lv and create a new one (should have space in your vg anyways, because otherwise how would you be flexible with lvm?)   I think this problem is way overblown and people just want to be outraged because it is fun. Sorry - but this won't solve any problem at all. As I mentioned before, I am using deduplication, compression and snapshotting on the files in my Dropbox folder. I want to have these backed up using my btrbk snapshotting, and I need to save the space by compression and deduplication, otherwise I'd need a larger SSD.  So no, sorry, that's not a solution for me.   pCloud has a full account rollback feature, which spares me from doing snaphots, and in any case, setting up a local Sync folder as others have outlined before makes it behave like Dropbox, so I can deduplicate and snapshot important data to my liking. The additional VFS via FUSE is just an extra feature which Dropbox never had, essentially, not many real technical features have been added to Dropbox in the past years, to my feeiling. What pCloud offers is like "selective sync on demand" via the VFS, and of course you can still sync full folders. In my opinion, this is a pretty cool addition, and it allows for new usecases.   I'm also in contact with pCloud support since it seems their deduplication per account is not (yet) up to par with what Dropbox is doing internally. Even though I'm still a free user, they took my recommendation seriously, asked for technical details, and forwarded it to their experts. That's very different from Dropbox's reaction in this very forum, which is just PR, without any technical reasoning.   In case somebody wants to do me a favour, here's my invite link for pCloud: <<referral links are not permitted>> I'll cover my cloud needs with them, and anything which should be private will be shuffled into Syncthing, which is astonishinly easy to set up on a Raspberry Pi and runs pretty stable. ... View more

@metabubble  schrieb: In theory, using encryption ontop of ext4 is already something "that has to be set up" with lots of effort. Creting keys, loading pam modules, etc. A sysadmin will have no problem at all creating a loopback disk inside his encrypted home folder to expose plain ext4 to the dropbox folder. There even is a fool-proof step-by-step guide https://metabubble.net/linux/how-to-keep-using-dropbox-even-if-you-dont-use-unencrypted-ext4-workaround/ The amount of whining in this thread shows me, that prople just want to complain as hard as they can instead of wanting to find solutions. Sorry, but no - I won't give up my differential backup with btrfs, deduplication and compression on btrfs, and store a huge bulky file on my btrfs system, which will bloat my hourly snapshots. Not if there is no technical reason whatsoever. On my systems with encrypted ext4, I'm using borgbackup, which also requires more complex configuration to backup the loop device's contents only and not the bulky file itself. Yes, all this can be solved, but on btrfs it means giving up all filesystem features - I'll need a larger SSD. And why should I do that? It's far easier and cheaper to switch to a competitor.   The fact that there is no response at all from the Dropbox team on a topic trending for many days in a row now alone is enough to make me want not to stay with this service. ... View more

@Dan B.2Check a few pages back, some others reported they were refunded their subscription money after complaining with support that essentially the app will become unusable on their devices. ... View more

Another question might be: Even if you might be using plain ext4 right now, will you still be using it in a year? Or will you use encryption, or maybe BTRFS? This limitation is just insane, it removes any chance of Dropbox being future proof. And no valid technical reason has been given. That's just in line with the lack of Changelogs. Political decisions without any technical reasoning. ... View more

That's an extremely poor move. xattrs are available on most Linux filesystems, e.g. btrfs is very widespread and the default on many distros. There are also valid reasons to use ecryptfs, or to share Dropbox storage on a dual boot system on NTFS.   All this is broken by this decision, for no technical reason. I've been a Dropbox user from almost day 1, have recommended it to many friends, because I was happy with how the team embraced useful technologies and ws cross-platform. Recently, things are going downhill, though - changelogs have become useless, client integration with Qt5 has become problematic, no Dropquests anymore, global deduplication has been turned off, and now finally you are essentially dropping Linux as supported platform, supporting only a few distros which use ext4.   Do you want to lose your users so badly? ... View more