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Dropbox on Debian 12. But it wants to sync all of my Dropbox files down to the debian box.

I successfully installed Dropbox on a headless Debian 12 VPS. I authorized it and it works.

I am hoping to be able to backup files on the debian machine to my Dropbox account, as I have lots of room on my Dropbox.

However, when I start Dropbox it then wants to sync all of my Dropbox files down to the debian box which I don't want.

I tried some command line options using the python script:

./dropbox.py exclude remove Apps

Where "Apps" is a folder in my dropbox that I don't want to sync down to the Debian box.

I believe this resulted in the Apps folder being deleted from Dropbox!! I had to go to deleted files and restore.

So my Dropbox has all sorts of files in it... and I don't want any of those files/folders to be synced down to the Debian box. I can't figure out the syntax to use to tell dropbox on the debian box to ignore syncing specific folders that are in my dropbox.

Once I can get dropbox to stop pulling down all those files, then I just want to symlink a backup directory into the Dropbox folder on the Debian box, and have those backup files go out to Dropbox. That should be as easy just dropping files into the Dropbox folder on the debian box.

I'm sure the command is easy but now I'm afraid to play more because I don't want it to fill up my debian drive and I don't want to risk deleting files on dropbox.

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Здравко

Once again: Your command will work only when your current working directory is the Dropbox folder! In such a way the folder name is path too. Otherwise no.

To work in all cases you may try something like:

~/dropbox.py exclude add ~/Dropbox/Apps

Good luck.

All comments

Megan

Hey @GTFreymann, welcome to our Community!

As a first step, can you confirm that you've written the command with /dropbox.py or is it possible that you've adjusted the path for the Dropbox folder on the device as shown here?

Now, as for your second question in regards to symlinks, they are not generally supported, so I can't help with that, but I'd be happy to see what we can find about your first issue.

Also, we do have some Linux users, so they might be able to help and suggest or share their experience.

Let me know, and we'll take it from there!

GTFreymann

Hi,

The path to dropbox is /root/Dropbox but I have installed dropbox in /root

I then downloaded the "dropbox.py" script and placed that in /root, made it chmod 700

This all works. I can start/stop/status and all is well.

My big issue is I don't want Dropbox to sync all of my files from Dropbox in the cloud to the Debian VPS at all. I'm just trying to sync files from Debian to/from Dropbox, and as stated, none of the commands I've tried have told debian dropbox to not sync anything else to the debian dropbox.

Здравко

@GTFreymann wrote:
..., none of the commands I've tried have told debian dropbox to not sync anything else to the debian dropbox.

Hi @GTFreymann,

Hm..🤔 You want to stop syncing particular folders down to your local folder (i.e. to add them to a list of excluded folders). Let's see...

@GTFreymann wrote:
...
I tried some command line options using the python script:
./dropbox.py exclude remove Apps
Where "Apps" is a folder in my dropbox that I don't want to sync ...

Ah..🤷 What are you trying actually? Do you want to add or to remove folder to exclude list (i.e. to remove something that's not there actually - by default this list is empty - initially)? 🧐

Clarify to yourself what exactly you're going to do and would be easier. 😉

Hope this helps.

GTFreymann

I don't know this is difficult to understand.

I have Dropbox.com - it contains a lot of files I want to keep in the cloud. On some of my windows computers, I don't sync the entire collection as some folders are meaningless to have on every computer that I have the Dropbox client installed on.

Now I have a Debian VPS and I want share backup files on the Debian VPS with Dropbox.com but I don't want to have all of my Dropbox.com files shared down to the Debian VPS. When I run the dropbox client on the Debian box it immediately wants to sync my entire Dropbox.com file collection. I don't want any of my other dropbox.com files to sync on this particular device.

On my windows clients, I have to go into preferences, sync, selective sync and un check folders I don't want.

I don't know how you do this through the command line on Debian. I'm just looking for clarification on the command to use on the CLI interface as this is a headless VPS in the cloud.

GTFreymann

Also here is screen grab from my windows computers of the folders I have sync'd to Dropbox.com

On this PC - you can see I have some folders un-checked.

On the Debian client, I don't want *any* of these folders to sync from Dropbox.com TO the debian box. But I need to know what commands to run to tell the debian client to ignore 13 folders.

Здравко

Hi again @GTFreymann,

Yes, I understand and fully agree with you. A prize "most stupid sub-commands names" should comes to the Dropbox designer has proposed that names.

All your steps you have till now are correct and matching to your intention! The only incorrect thing is the interpretation of the sub-commands names. Here "remove" means to remove something from a list of excluded folders! Do you have some folder excluded at the moment? 🧐 I suspect no. So no any result may be expected. Opposite, "add" means to add the pointed folder to the exclude list and remove from the local Dropbox folder (not opposite 😉, as you might think).

Opposite of any logic, set a checkmark in GUI Selective sync preferences is the same like removing folder from exclude list and opposite - adding folder to exclude list is the same like removing checkmark from Selective sync preferences.

Hope it's a bit more clear now.

PS: Maybe it would be easier for you just to think for "add" subcommand as "remove" and for "remove as "add".

ADD: One more clarification about the terms in use. "ignore" and "exclude" are completely different things! They have just opposite meaning; I saw you have them used interchangeably!

GTFreymann

Ok, so something like this would tell the dropbox client on the debian VPS to "not" sync this folder from dropbox.com to debian, where "Apps" is a folder containing files...

./dropbox.py exclude add Apps

Здравко

If your current working directory is Dropbox, Yes. Keep in mind that the folders are paths, not just some names!

PS: You can easy check whether you can expect result from the posted command using something like:

ls -ld Apps

If the last command succeeds, then the your will succeed too.

GTFreymann

Ok, so the folder "Apps" is on Dropbox.com and I don't want to sync it down on the Debian box. Will that syntax work?

Здравко

Once again: Your command will work only when your current working directory is the Dropbox folder! In such a way the folder name is path too. Otherwise no.

To work in all cases you may try something like:

~/dropbox.py exclude add ~/Dropbox/Apps

Good luck.

GTFreymann

Awh, I see 🙂

Ok, I'll give that a try. Thanks!

GTFreymann

@GTFreymann wrote:
Awh, I see 🙂

Ok, I'll give that a try. Thanks!

~/dropbox.py exclude add ~/Dropbox/Apps

This works!

I started dropbox and then had to keep listing the ~/Dropbox folder in order to see what folders it was syncing, and then run the command on that Directory one by one as they appeared.

Great news! I hope this helps somebody in the future.

Здравко

@GTFreymann wrote:
..., and then run the command on that Directory one by one as they appeared.
...

One more thing: You don't need to run the command for every one folder. You may list more folders at the same time if you want. For instance you may execute something like:

~/dropbox.py exclude add ~/Dropbox/Apps ~/Dropbox/Documents

In such a way both Apps and Documents will be excluded. 😉