You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
When will online-only files work on Linux?
I need to save space on my hard drive. Online-only files would be the perfect solution, but it still does not work on linux fedora.
When will we have this solution?
edugsdf wrote:
I need to save space on my hard drive. Smart Sync would be the perfect solution, but it still does not work on linux fedora.
When will we have this solution?
At the moment, Smart Sync is only available on Windows and Mac. Dropbox has made no announcement on its availability on Linux. They usually don't discuss timelines or upcoming features until they're reaady to announce them, so we likely won't know that it's coming until it's already here, assuming that it's coming at all.
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.
