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?
@edugsdf wrote: I need to save space on my hard drive. Smart Sync would be the perfect solution, but it still does not work on linux fedora. When will we have this solution?
I need to save space on my hard drive. Smart Sync would be the perfect solution, but it still does not work on linux fedora.
At the moment, Smart Sync is only available on Windows and Mac. Dropbox has made no announcement on its availability on Linux. They usually don't discuss timelines or upcoming features until they're reaady to announce them, so we likely won't know that it's coming until it's already here, assuming that it's coming at all.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
pls immeplent smart sync for linux. Linux is more stable than Windows. Why linux users is not treated the same as other users?
Linux Users are better than others and deserve this implemented before than others :P
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.
+1 for this feature request. I have been a paying Dropbox customer for years and have recently switched to Linux. The Dropbox user experience on Linux is 3rd class compared to Mac and Windows. Support for SmartSync is the number one thing I'm missing.
Goog morning.
Another paying customer needing support for smart sync in Linux (Ubuntu / Elementary). Information about wether the company has plans to implement this feature or not should be nice to make a decission.
Thank you
Hi. Please advise the plans for better support for Linux. Paying customers are pleading for it. Thank you.
This has been ongoing for 2 years? 2 years we have been paying for this feature and it is not available?Please advise on the progress of this? When will Smart Sync be available?
(Just realised my last comment didn't show up. Hmm...)
@joeytwiddle If you have a glance at the nautilus-dropbox project you'd realise it's not quite feasible to add this functionality to it. This project is basically a filesystem watcher purely in the user space and AFAIK there is no good way to 'trick' your system to show some files that don't really exist then download them on demand. Smart Sync (previously Project Infinite) works around this issue by offering a proprietary kernel module.
The best open-source alternative right now is probably Rclone. It hasn't got this feature right now, and I doubt whether such kinds of vendor-specific features will ever be their priority.
And of course the Dropbox API specifications are public and I won't be surprised if someone capable can write a new client in a few hundred hours. But anyone who does this always risks wasting tons of time on a project only to be replaced by an official one that Dropbox can roll out at any time. Not to mention that Dropbox has already got it working in macOS which is essentially BSD so it should be much easier to port it to Linux compared with starting one from scratch.
I switched to another cloud solution for two reasons: the lack of smart sync on the Linux and the increase in the price (and giving me 2 TB of storage, which I don't need)
Same here: As a business advanced admin I can not currently deploy DB in a manner that helps us on linux. Having about 2TB of data available and shared forces me to support people while fiddeling around with selective sync on-per-user basis and myself for every request or work with the inefficient web interface.
For now the only thing working is to rely on nearly unmaintained OSS FUSE implementations or fiddle around with rclone/user services.
I know linux can be a hassle on the UI side, but please at least provide a fully featured service that is configurable through files/service.d or whatever. there is still no way to create transfers, share files with advanced features (like passwords) and all that "newer" stuff. No paper integration into the client, notifications not working. Same goes for multiple accounts.
Some kind of feature parity would be really nice. Right now its just a website with a sync client that does the bare minimum to exist.
Linux Mint 19 here.
Indeed, no smart sync for Linux in the dropbox client. Annoying to say the least.
Selective sync is available, which is workable if dropbox storage is set up sensibly, allowing you to select appropriate chunks of archive to be used online when needed (for ex. folder with this years pictures selected, previous years deselected &c. )
BUT
discovered rclone mount, which I've set up with good caching settings and mounting dropbox as a systemd service. Seems pretty performant.
Wow - How did I miss rclone? That sounds amazing! I have been a fan of rsync for many years. I'll be checking this out later today.
Currently, Smart Sync is not available on the Linux platform.
From technical support:
There are some things that it is not possible to use when using the Dropbox client on Linux.These are as follows:
Given the increasing popularity of Linux and it's serious use in the business as well as the home environments, is it not time to escalate the requirement for a Linux client to a higher level?
Selective Sync is possible of course (with all of it's pitfalls for the unwary with volume data and minimal local disk capacity) but given the popularity of cloud based storage solutions, is it not time for Dropbox to embrace the initiative and move forward to compete more favourably with the big players in the home NAS market and «steal a march» on them?
Hi,
I am a long time dropbox user, and I love all the features, in particular the smart sync. After you released the smart sync, I upgraded my dropbox account, and start to make heavy use of smart sync on my workflow.
However, I recently moved my OS to Linux Ubuntu, and I was shocked when I realized smart sync is not available for Linux users. I would like to suggest Dropbox work on this extension. Smart sync was key to my workflow, and I am rethinking my usage and signature with Dropbox due to the limitation of using this feature for Linux Users
Best,
Hi, we are still awaiting for SmartSync on Linux.
I'm working around this for the moment by using a free account (2 measly GB) and using that on the Linux laptop. Then I share what I want on the latop using my main account. Horrible ! I also tried rclone, but it is no good if you are offline.
Mind you that the linux client does have the possibility to plainly exclude folders.
One could set up the dropbox storage in two area's : "online" and "offline", two "root" folders so to speak. Less clever than smartsync, but rather transparent.
Please add this feautre on linux...
@Dropbox
When will you finally get this done?
We are not asking for so much.
We want Smart Sync for the main distros of Linux!!
I pay for it. Please.
Agree. That's the only very useful feature to be added to the linux client...hopefully soon but three years have passed...don't hold your breath
Linux still waiting.
The smart sync feature is a desired feature for space restricted Linux systems. If there was a means to mount the online only dropbox folder for the linux user home directory by default that would also be desired with smart sync. Thanks
Smart Sync is a very useful feature, especially with larger drives with a lot of infrequently accessed files. The feature is available on Windows and macOS, but not on Linux.
Dropbox's Linux compatibility is one of the most important features IMHO and I feel that Linux users are a bit left behind. Why not spare us some technical love and give us some new features?
Dropbox Linux Client have a lot of small problems but, it's for another ticket.
Please add this feature to Linux. It's a big let down to be a paying customer of this service and not have this very useful feature.
I'd also love this feature. My primary OS is Linux.
But...as someone with a couple decades of development experience I can tell you that doing this properly is not simple. Claiming this is a "simple" request in your comments is not helpful. The file system APIs between Windows, Mac, and Linux are different. While there might be some code re-use, there's a lot that can't be.
They'll only do this if they determine there is enough demand to justify it. Upvote and give constructive comments instead of stuff like "C'mon Dropbox, this is easy". 😛
Also, they have a published API so if you have development experience you can also try your hand at writing this and you can discover that it's not easy. 🙂
