When will online-only files work on Linux?

[edugsdf]

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?

[Daphne]

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!

[neltnerb]

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.

[Hypersphere]

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.

[neltnerb]

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

[Hypersphere]

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.

[sprintexec]

I arrived here when looking to see how SmartSync works with my linux ubuntu set up; only to find that Dropbox don't offer this nor do they have any plans to bake it. This is inexcusable, I'm off to look for an alternative.

[FrederickZh]

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 🙂

[justin78]

pls immeplent smart sync for linux. Linux is more stable than Windows. Why linux users is not treated the same as other users?

[FErnando 3141596]

Linux Users are better than others and deserve this implemented before than others 😛

[joeytwiddle]

We're Linux users, so perhaps we can add the features we want to their source code: https://github.com/dropbox/nautilus-dropbox

Or if that's too difficult, we can use an alternative open source product.