Dropbox does not really work

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1

Hi Everyone.

I have recently moved to Leap 15.1 with xfce.

There have been various issues including Dropbox acting wonky.

Basically, I install Dropbox from the package manager and all seems fine.

It starts synching (it says), but does not give any kinds of progress reports either through GUI or when running dropbox status from the command line.

When I run dropbox status it just says that it is synching, but not how many files left etc.

At this point Dropbox had been saying this for a few days.

Yes, I do have lots of stuff there, but I do not know if it is actually synching or is hung.

I previously tried uninstalling Dropbox and reinstalling, but eventually hit the same issue.

Anyone can shed some light on this?

2

On which filesystem are the files? If in your homedir, please show


mount | grep home
3

Your problems may not be unique.
Just this past week, I helped someone on MSWindows doing a migration to a new machine and discovered that despite Dropbox was fully sync-d, many files were not.
So, had to do a file/directory comparison, and transfer the “missing” files by an alternate method.

Bottom line, I don’t think that Dropbox sync is reliable.
Recommend instead that you manually upload/download your files, and pay attention to what is happening.

Just goes to show, Dropbox is providing only enough code which “should” work, but if it’s not known to work properly then should have installed additional code to ensure file and directory integrity.

TSU

4

Thank you so much for your reply!

It seems strange though, as I never had these issues on Linux or Windows, and we rely a lot on the automatic synching functionality in our work.

ls | grep home is empty.

5

Hi
The command asked for was;


mount | grep home

Dropbox discontinued some filesystems support… so need to see what you have used for the /home mountpoint.

6

I decided to delete the dropbox folder, .dropbox and .dropbox-dist files, reinstalled it, and trying to see what happens now.

Hopefully this will help.

Something is up with Dropbox I think.

7

My apologies! That output is empty too!

8

Please show ( and I mean show … not tell it’s empty )


cat /etc/fstab
whoami
9

Hi
What about the output from;


lsblk
10

Thank you malcolmlewis and Knurpht,

Below are the outputs you asked for:


 $lsblk
NAME                                   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda                                      8:0    0   1.8T  0 disk  
├─sda1                                   8:1    0   500M  0 part  /boot/efi
├─sda2                                   8:2    0  23.5G  0 part  
│ └─cr-auto-1                          254:0    0  23.5G  0 crypt [SWAP]
└─sda3                                   8:3    0   1.8T  0 part  
  └─cr_ata-SanDisk_SDSSDH32000G_183795801264-part3
                                       254:1    0   1.8T  0 crypt /
sdb                                      8:16   0   1.9T  0 disk  
├─sdb1                                   8:17   0   500M  0 part  /mnt/B48D-2297
└─sdb2                                   8:18   0   1.9T  0 part  
  └─sdb2                               254:2    0   1.9T  0 crypt /mnt/mike_old
sr0                                     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom   
mmcblk0                                179:0    0 238.5G  0 disk  
└─mmcblk0p1                            179:1    0 238.5G  0 part  



whoami
mike



cat /etc/fstab
UUID=3146d619-4605-4298-9657-83b6961ce34d  /          ext4  acl,user_xattr  0  1
UUID=FA4C-0E36                             /boot/efi  vfat  defaults        0  0
UUID=d23905e2-1468-456d-bcb0-c2fbaf8a60cb  swap       swap  defaults        0  0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/B48D-2297 /mnt/B48D-2297 auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
/dev/mapper/sdb2 /mnt/mike_old ext4
11

Hi
OK, you should be fine with ext4 then (I believe they brought back btrfs, xfs and others).

12

So I know for a fact that it is not actually syncing because the size of the Dropbox folder is not changing at all over time.