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Dropbox is compatible with Ext4 but doesn't recognize ext4 drive?

Axiom2018

So, like most Linux users, I've gotten the message about needing to upgrade to an ext4 drive. I had an extra drive in my machine with nothing on it so I formatted it to ext4. I rebooted then went into my prefs to change location and it tells me:

To sync your Dropbox, move your Dropbox folder to a partition with a compatible File System. Dropbox is compatible with Ext4.

So, when is an ext4 drive not an ext4 drive?

I'm using v55.4.171

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Walter

Hey there @Axiom2018 - sorry to hear about this.

If you have formatted your drive to be ext4 you shouldn't be getting this message. Note that if you received a notification and you are running ext4, it may be because you are also running ecryptfs. Ecrypfts is not supported.

Could this be the reason behind this?

Axiom2018

Hi.

No, ecrypt is not running, it's actually not even installed. Here's the df -Th output

/dev/sdb1 ext4 459G 70M 435G 1% /media/daryl/storage500GB

I read somewhere here about having it on the same drive as / , is that correct? If so, I'm not going to format my system just to use dropbox.

I also checked and removed an old install from 2 years ago thinking it could have been that machine (not likely in my mind since the app wouldn't let me select the drive in my current machine but who knows) and still have the same issue.

Walter

Thanks for the update @Axiom2018!

Have you tried installing our software normally and then point the Dropbox folder to the drive you'll be using ( the ext4 )? If so, are you still getting this message?

Also, could you please verify that your device's setup is meeting our minimum requirements and that it's actually supported?

Axiom2018

Hi Walter

The software is currently working and has for years on the same set up. Only issue is with the ext4 drive

GTK2-engines 2.20.2-3

Glib 2.42

Libnotify 0.7.6-2

Libappindicator 0.4.92-3.1 (latest version)

Nautilus 3.14.1-2

Dropbox 2015.10.28

/home/XXXXXXXXX# cat /proc/version
Linux version 3.16.0-4-amd64 (debian-kernel@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 4.8.4 (Debian 4.8.4-1) ) #1 SMP Debian 3.16.51-3 (2017-12-13)

Axiom2018

Ok, I did uninstall and reinstall the software with a fresh download from the site. I went in to change the location and same issue

Walter

Thank you for the additional information @Axiom2018 - much appreciated.

While we don’t officially support Debian, people have reported building from source on Debian. Your results may vary though. As long as your drive is formatted in ext4, you should be fine.

Also note that Dropbox uses Qt 5.5, and as such needs the following software to work on desktop environments:

GTK 2.12 or higher
Glib 2.22 or higher
Libnotify 0.4.4 or higher
Libappindicator 1.0 or higher
Nautilus 2.30.0 or higher.

I know this is not much but I sure hope it helps to some extent. Let me know how this goes.

Axiom2018

Hi Walter

I'm using Debian Sid and there is no Libappindicator 1.0. As it is currently working with version 0.49, I don't think that's the issue. I think the issue is your software is saying it needs to have the folder on an ext4 drive but the software is almost 3 years old and has a bug in it since it can't see 2 different ext4 drives.

I can try and compile from source but if it installs the v55 I have now, I don't see it making much of a difference.

Walter

I'd hate to speculate about this as it's not officially supported at the moment @Axiom2018 - do keep me posted on your findings though; I'd appreciate it.

If there's anything I can do to help in the meantime, please let me know.

Jeroen O.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Dropbox checks the location of the binary (/usr/bin/dropbox). I run a recent Ubuntu version with nautilus-dropbox installed. The root partition is ext3, the separate /home partition is ext4 so it should be good, yet Dropbox complains. I hope somebody can confirm this.

Axiom2018

That's a good posibility as well which means I'm done with dropbox because I have my system set up the way I want and I'll be damned if I'm going to format and reinstall all my apps for an app I'm hardly using at the time. I'll figure out something else before I do that

dazinger

I also have this issue. I am running Ubuntu 16.04 and have an ext4 partition, so this really surprises me that this problem occurs.

I mean yeah sure I'm too lazy to format my main drive as well, but this problem seems like it only needs a trivial fix.

Jeroen O.

Well, Dropbox's really lost it. Today I got a second warning from Dropbox for a different Linux system, where *all* relevant partitions are ext4.

Message to Dropbox: please fix your filesystem detection routine or improve the error message, or Dropbox goes in November. There are alternatives.

ADinamita

So, this means that it is no longer possible to use Dropbox when ecryptfs is also running?

jdu

Just want to add that I have a similar issue here. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, root system in ext3, dropbox folder in ext4 but not recognized as such by the app.

It's unfortunately to see the lack of response so far, but maybe this is just part of some cost cut decision to reduce the resource on providing Linux support in general (may make sense from a business perspective).

Axiom2018

@ADinamitaexactly

Jdu - that's the same set up I'm using except I'm trying to move to a non-encrypted ext4 drive and the software is saying it's not a valid location (or some BS similar to that). I mostly just use it as a quick and easy method of transfering from my phone to the computer so guess I need to start looking at bluetooth or something else.

dtamayo

I'm having the same problem. Here are the relevant lines from sudo blkid

/dev/nvme0n1p1: UUID="495..." TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="afa..."

/dev/nvme1n1p1: UUID="19d..." TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="44f..."

I currently have dropbox running correctly on nvme1, which is where the OS (Ubuntu 18.04) is installed. But when I try to move the folder location to the (mounted) nvme0, I get the same incompatible filesystem error.

Here is what my /etc/fstab lines look like:

UUID=19d... / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1

UUID=495... /mnt/ssd ext4 defaults 0 2

I tried changing the options on the drive that's not working to errors=remount-ro so that they would match, but that also did not fix the problem.

Axiom2018

Not sure it will work for you but I totally uninstalled the app, left it a few days and then grabbed the files to install again. Once I did, it did an update (59.4.93) and is now working with no messages on an ext3 drive partition

# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=1da462b1-03bf-422f-ae4c-5a8b3a87b82b / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=0e0bec2a-aaca-4883-a206-3bb13a64a676 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=0aa4f146-4b6a-4c40-9bf8-23648479eb49 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/sr0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

AminSadeghi

I've found a workaround. Create a new folder within the mount point of your ext4 drive. Then, simply choose that folder as the target in the Dropbox app. Here's an example:

Mount point of ext4 drive:

/media/mynewdrive

Make new directory within the mount point, say "DropboxContainer". Now choose the following path (simply choose in the Dropbox GUI) as the sync target:

/media/mynewdrive/DropboxContainer

To confirm, your Dropbox sync folder would look like this:

/media/mynewdrive/DropboxContainer/Dropbox

In my case, it used to complain about the ext4 thing, but this workaround seems to have done the job. Please let me know if it works for you.

Axiom2018

They changed something, location doesn't even need to be on an ext4 drive anymore as shown in my fstab above. My Dropbox location is /home/XXXX/Dropbox which is an ext3 partition

AminSadeghi

Oh, I see. Are you saying that they've fixed it?

Axiom2018

There has been an upgrade in the software so I think they did

AminSadeghi

Hmm. It's strange since I still can't set the target directory to be /media/mydrive/Dropbox. Do you have any clue how I can get around it?

Axiom2018

Did you try competely uninstalling, grabbing the new files and installing fresh then letting it update?

sorican

I don't know what he's done, or hasn't done, but I've got a fresh installation of debian that I've been trying to move the storage location of, and it's giving me the same error.

I've got dropbox installed and operating, but I get the error when I try to move the storage location to...anywhere, even if it's just from /home/me/thisisstupid/Dropbox instead of just /home/me/Dropbox. (although I'm trying to move it off the 32gb eMMC and onto the 1tb hdd.)

EDIT: I've found a solution (read: handed a solution by a very helpful guy on stack exchange) for my particular problem. Specifically, dropbox uses extended file attributes, and needs to have user_xattr added as a mounting option in fstab.

Credit where credit is due, here's the post by TelCom that gave the solution.

might help others here, but I dunno.

jupblb

I still had troubles with moving the Dropbox directory (from ~/Dropbox to /data/Dropbox) so for now I just did `ln -s /data /data/.here` and passed the symlink to the app. Works for now but I'd like to see this fixed in the future.

AminSadeghi

@sorican The fix you posted didn't work for me. I added user_xattr to my fstab for the drive I want Dropbox in. Is there anything else I need to do?

AminSadeghi

@Axiom2018 For starters, how do I update Dropbox in the first place? I downloaded Dropbox from here and then installed it. The current version reads 59.4.93. Is that the latest? and if not, how do I update it?

Axiom2018

I installed the 64bit version, once it was installed it said something about updating and when it was done, I had version 59.4.93. I didn't do anything else.

ltomov

I was getting the same error when trying to move Dropbox into /media/lacho/Dropbox (that folder uses ext4, non-encryptfs).

So I used another folder /opt/lacho/Dropbox and this time is recognized it. Both folders have the same fs, but I guess Dropbox seems to have some issue with /media.

And this happens on Linux Mint with the latest .deb installation (59.4.93).

The only issue I have now is that when moving it actually created one more "Dropbox" folder, so the path is now /opt/lacho/Dropbox/Dropbox which is very ugly, but when i try to move it to one folder up, it says "unsupported fs" once again.

jameso

I'm in the same boat. After getting an email about my Linux server running 18.04 needed to be on ext4, I moved files all around and had to format my large drive that was still on ext3. After going to all of the trouble, it didn't like the partion, complaining that it still wasn't ext4. My fstab looks fine, so I think they have a bug.

UUID=blahblah /media/HD_1500_SAMSUNG ext4 rw,user,exec,auto,user_xattr 0 0

I'm using Dropbox v60.4.107. I had to put the Dropbox folder up one level (/media/HD_1500_SAMSUNG/DropboxContainer/Dropbox). Thank you AminSadeghi, your suggestion worked.

For a paying customer ($99) a year, I would think my setup is a common one. I have an SSD as the OS disk and spinners for my large storage disks. My Dropbox 1T account is on my spinners since it can take up that much space. I can see how they can't support all of these file systems, but they need to fix the only one they now support.