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Back in Nov 2018, Dropbox went down this same lazy and inexcusable path, by programming their Linux client to shut down on any file system that was not Ext4.[1
by winter_blue 8y ago
Back in Nov 2018, Dropbox went down this same lazy and inexcusable path, by programming their Linux client to shut down on any file system that was not Ext4.[1] I was using F2FS. Their excuse was that extended attributes support was critical to Dropbox, which is not a valid excuse since F2FS, XFS, ZFS, etc, all support extended attributes.[2] It would have been just a few lines of code to check if the user was running a filesystem that had extended attributes support. So presumably, they probably just didn't want to QA on multiple systems, so laziness won. I had to back up all my files, reformat my F2FS partition to Ext4, and restore my files, to get Dropbox working again. I've been a paying customer for 4+ years (at the $9.99/month level), and this is what I have to deal with.
Moreover, the Dropbox mobile apps and web UI still do not support editing plain text files (.txt / .md) -- even though they've added support for editing MS Doc (.doc / .docx) files. Compared to supporting editing MS Doc files, supporting plain text file editing would be so trivial for them to add, yet they haven't. I keep all my notes and thoughts in plain text files. When I don't have my Linux laptop, I'm forced to use Google Docs on my phone, even though I'd prefer to have all my notes/thoughts in my neatly organized collection text files.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any solid alternatives to Dropbox, that have reliable non-flaky support on Linux, and good iOS and Android apps.
[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-client-warns-me-that-it-ll-stop-syncing-in-Nov-why/td-p/306368 https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-clien...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#Linux
- url00 8y agoActually, Dropbox's Android app does let you edit text files. It was one of the main reasons I went with Dropbox.
- 4BxHkLgUVBG 8y agoiPhone Dropbox lets me edit txt files. I also had to reformat even though mine was ext4 but i was using ecryptfs which wasn’t supported.
- winter_blue 8y agoThanks for the note. They must have added .txt file editing support after I last tried editing one on their app. For encryption, I'm using dm-crypt with LUKS on my root partition on Arch Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_entire_system#LUKS_on_a_partition https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_... It works pretty well. I didn't have to mess with the underlying encrypted LUKS partition/volume in order to reformat.