"I just have to change my habit of having it constantly on while working. Turn Dropbox on and sync before starting to work and then turn it off." Hohoho. Allo

"I just have to change my habit of having it constantly on while working. Turn Dropbox on and sync before starting to work and then turn it off." Hohoho. Allow me to suggest a solution. Suppose that you would be ok with having Dropbox sync files every five minutes. Let's suppose that 10 seconds is usually more than enough to do whatever syncing is necessary. Well, then: $ while :; do killall -STOP Dropbox; sleep 300; killall -CONT Dropbox; sleep 10; done I do things like this to throttle the CPU usage and, in some cases, the power consumption of applications that really don't need what they're using. This really should be a feature provided by the operating system, but in the meantime, I resort to ridiculous hacks of this sort. (Note that, if you ^C the above loop, Dropbox will likely be still STOPped and you'll have to CONT it again. It is possible to write a more sophisticated program to address this problem.)