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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.
(Just realised my last comment didn't show up. Hmm...)
joeytwiddle If you have a glance at the nautilus-dropbox project you'd realise it's not quite feasible to add this functionality to it. This project is basically a filesystem watcher purely in the user space and AFAIK there is no good way to 'trick' your system to show some files that don't really exist then download them on demand. Smart Sync (previously Project Infinite) works around this issue by offering a proprietary kernel module.
The best open-source alternative right now is probably Rclone. It hasn't got this feature right now, and I doubt whether such kinds of vendor-specific features will ever be their priority.
And of course the Dropbox API specifications are public and I won't be surprised if someone capable can write a new client in a few hundred hours. But anyone who does this always risks wasting tons of time on a project only to be replaced by an official one that Dropbox can roll out at any time. Not to mention that Dropbox has already got it working in macOS which is essentially BSD so it should be much easier to port it to Linux compared with starting one from scratch.
