New Disk format requirements for using DropBox

[Boca]

Apologies if this is viewed as cross-posting but I feel out of my depth in this thread ]viewtopic.php?f=61&t=275504#p1511316.

I received an email from Dropbox stating

What to do next
Choose a new location for your Dropbox folder:

tony-ThinkPad-SL510, Linux 4.4.0-130-generic
Move Dropbox to an Ext4 drive

tony-Latitude-E6430, Linux 4.15.0-30-generic
Move Dropbox to an Ext4 drive

I don't have enough internal drive space for my full Dropbox so use an external drive which is formatted as fuseblk

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tony@tony-Latitude-E6430 ~ $ df -T
Filesystem     Type     1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev           devtmpfs   6053796         0   6053796   0% /dev
tmpfs          tmpfs      1216808     55400   1161408   5% /run
/dev/sda1      ext4     295275440 237780800  42472460  85% /
tmpfs          tmpfs      6084024     60364   6023660   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs          tmpfs         5120         4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs          tmpfs      6084024         0   6084024   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
cgmfs          tmpfs          100         0       100   0% /run/cgmanager/fs
tmpfs          tmpfs      1216808        96   1216712   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sdb1      fuseblk  976728060 877782236  98945824  90% /media/tony/My Passport

To continue to use Dropbox, is it as simple as the following steps?

• Unlink my Dropbox folder then move it to a temp location
  reformat sdb1 as ext4
  copy the dropbox folder back
  relink it to Dropbox

TIA, Tony

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tony@tony-Latitude-E6430 ~ $ specs
System:    Host: tony-Latitude-E6430 Kernel: 4.15.0-30-generic x86_64 (64 bit gcc: 5.4.0)
           Desktop: MATE 1.18.0 (Gtk 3.18.9-1ubuntu3.3) Distro: Linux Mint 18.3 Sylvia
Machine:   System: Dell (portable) product: Latitude E6430 v: 01
           Mobo: Dell model: 0CPWYR v: A00 Bios: Dell v: A07 date: 10/08/2012
CPU:       Dual core Intel Core i5-3210M (-HT-MCP-) cache: 3072 KB
           flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 9967
           clock speeds: max: 3100 MHz 1: 2876 MHz 2: 2935 MHz 3: 2797 MHz 4: 2912 MHz
Graphics:  Card: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0
           Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
           Resolution: 1366x768@60.01hz, 1024x768@60.00hz
           GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Ivybridge Mobile GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 17.2.8 Direct Rendering: Yes
Audio:     Card-1 Intel 7 Series/C210 Series Family High Definition Audio Controller
           driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:1b.0
           Card-2 Generalplus driver: USB Audio usb-ID: 003-005
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.15.0-30-generic
Network:   Card-1: Intel 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection driver: e1000e v: 3.2.6-k port: f080 bus-ID: 00:19.0
           IF: eno1 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
           Card-2: Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 driver: iwlwifi bus-ID: 02:00.0
           IF: wlp2s0 state: down mac: <filter>
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 1320.2GB (87.6% used) ID-1: /dev/sda model: TOSHIBA_MK3261GS size: 320.1GB
           ID-2: USB /dev/sdb model: My_Passport_07A8 size: 1000.2GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 282G used: 227G (85%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda1
           ID-2: swap-1 size: 12.75GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda5
RAID:      No RAID devices: /proc/mdstat, md_mod kernel module present
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 59.0C mobo: N/A
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info:      Processes: 213 Uptime: 9 days Memory: 3491.3/11882.9MB Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Gcc sys: 5.4.0
           Client: Shell (bash 4.3.481) inxi: 2.2.35 

[BenTrabetere]

I would start by getting a new external drive - df shows your 1T "My Passport" is 90% full. I just picked up a 2T model for around $70 US, and I considered spending an extra $20 for the 3T model. Format the new drive (or a partition) ext4 and use that for Dropbox.

Also, I would look for ways to reclaim space on sda1. It is starting to get crowded.

[Boca]

Hi,

I have done some housekeeping and reformatted /dev/sdb1 to ext4.

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tony@tony-Latitude-E6430 ~ $ df -T
Filesystem     Type     1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev           devtmpfs   6053792         0   6053792   0% /dev
tmpfs          tmpfs      1216808      9724   1207084   1% /run
/dev/sda1      ext4     295275440 244469840  35783420  88% /
tmpfs          tmpfs      6084024     27752   6056272   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs          tmpfs         5120         4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs          tmpfs      6084024         0   6084024   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
cgmfs          tmpfs          100         0       100   0% /run/cgmanager/fs
tmpfs          tmpfs      1216808        24   1216784   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sdb1      ext4     961271120     73364 912344972   1% /media/tony/DropBox_A

However, when I try to move the DropBox folder to /dev/sdb1 , I get an error "Can't create a Dropbox folder in the given location"

Screenshot at 2018-08-20 02-25-06.png

Any thoughts please?

Tony

PS /dev/sda1 is temporarily fuller than normal as I find a home for Dropbox data.

[Boca]

I have followed these steps from Dropbox (particularly the folder permissions one) but with no success

https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-we ... box-folder

In these steps, should I be referencing the proposed folder location rather than ~/Dropbox

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    Quit Dropbox by right-clicking the Dropbox menu from the menu bar and selecting Quit.
    Open a terminal window and copy and paste the following line into the terminal (exactly as written below):

    sudo chown "$USER" "$HOME"

    sudo chown -R "$USER" ~/Dropbox ~/.dropbox

    sudo chattr -R -i ~/Dropbox

    sudo chmod -R u+rw ~/Dropbox ~/.dropbox
    If your Dropbox folder is not ~/Dropbox, make sure you modify all the commands above to point to the correct location.
    Restart Dropbox by going to the Internet menu under Applications.

Tony

[lazarus]

In these steps, should I be referencing the proposed folder location rather than ~/Dropbox

Yes.

An alternative would be to make a folder in /home called Dropbox. ie. /home/Dropbox and instead of mounting /dev/sdb1 in /media/tony/DropBox_A, mount it in /home/Dropbox. (This would offend some 'purists' who believe it should be mounted in /media or /mnt but that's more of a style issue than anything. You can mount it almost anywhere...)

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sudo umount /dev/sdb1
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /home/Dropbox

and then you should be able to follow the provided directions exactly. (I'd also check that the hidden dir /home/.dropbox actually exists. It should, but... )

*IF* this works and you get Dropbox installed OK, then you should edit /etc/fstab to auto-mount the drive in that directory after every reboot, to avoid the need to manually remount it every session.



(Another alternative: make sure /home/Dropbox doesn't already exist. In a terminal type

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sudo ln -s  /media/tony/DropBox_A /home/Dropbox

...this'll create a "link" at /home/Dropbox which will actually reference the existing mount-point. I tend to avoid using this sorta thing unless there's a real need though.)

[Boca]

Hi Lazarus,

thank you for your help and suggestions.

I tried those but still could not get Dropbox to allow me to use sdb1 as its home.

I'm very nervous about screwing up dropbox and losing data; I'm going to investigate a larger internal hard drive and/or new pc.

Thank you anyway.

Regards, Tony

[gm10]

I tried those but still could not get Dropbox to allow me to use sdb1 as its home.

I don't know anything about dropbox but when changing the folder location, are you actually typing in sdb1? Because that would be wrong. You need to point to where you mounted the sdb1 partition in your filesystem, and unless you want to use the entire partition for dropbox, you'll want to create a folder for Dropbox on it and point it to that. But first you'll have to apply the commands to it that you copied from their instructions.

[Boca]

I tried those but still could not get Dropbox to allow me to use sdb1 as its home.

I don't know anything about dropbox but when changing the folder location, are you actually typing in sdb1? Because that would be wrong. You need to point to where you mounted the sdb1 partition in your filesystem, and unless you want to use the entire partition for dropbox, you'll want to create a folder for Dropbox on it and point it to that. But first you'll have to apply the commands to it that you copied from their instructions.

sorry, i was just using sdb1 as an abbreviation in the forum post

Rgds, Tony

[dhdurgee]

I have also received this notice from DropBox and see no reason for them to REQUIRE an ext4 formatted file system for their folder. My searches on this topic appear to indicate that they will be requiring use of extended attributes to support their new release. I have no intention of reformatting my disk to suit their requiements when other file systems are equally functional to meet their requirements.

I have contacted them to let them know of my position on this issue. Surely I a not the only one who want to avoid modifying a working system to suit the whims of ONE APPLICATION. Please consider contacting them about this. I would hope if enough people protest this ARBITRARY requirement on their part that they will modify their position to one that can be supported by function as opposed to whim.

Dave

[Boca]

I have also received this notice from DropBox and see no reason for them to REQUIRE an ext4 formatted file system for their folder. My searches on this topic appear to indicate that they will be requiring use of extended attributes to support their new release. I have no intention of reformatting my disk to suit their requiements when other file systems are equally functional to meet their requirements.

I have contacted them to let them know of my position on this issue. Surely I a not the only one who want to avoid modifying a working system to suit the whims of ONE APPLICATION. Please consider contacting them about this. I would hope if enough people protest this ARBITRARY requirement on their part that they will modify their position to one that can be supported by function as opposed to whim.

Dave

I have also registered my displeasure with Dropbox.

Rgds, Tony

[dhdurgee]

I have also received this notice from DropBox and see no reason for them to REQUIRE an ext4 formatted file system for their folder. My searches on this topic appear to indicate that they will be requiring use of extended attributes to support their new release. I have no intention of reformatting my disk to suit their requiements when other file systems are equally functional to meet their requirements.

I have contacted them to let them know of my position on this issue. Surely I a not the only one who want to avoid modifying a working system to suit the whims of ONE APPLICATION. Please consider contacting them about this. I would hope if enough people protest this ARBITRARY requirement on their part that they will modify their position to one that can be supported by function as opposed to whim.

Dave

I have also registered my displeasure with Dropbox.

Rgds, Tony

Glad to hear that I am not the only one unhappy with them about this. I had a thought and contacted them about it and received a possibly useful response. My system is set up so that I can still boot the w7pro that came on the laptop if I absolutely must do so for some reason. I have yet to do so in several years, but of course the partitions to support this are still there.

I thought to ask them if NTFS partitions would be supported from linux and received an affirmative answer. So, assuming I have enough free space on one of them, I have a fallback location for my DropBox folder if they do not see logic and support any and all file systems with the required extended attribute support.

Dave

[Boca]

Hi Lazarus,

thank you for your help and suggestions.

I tried those but still could not get Dropbox to allow me to use sdb1 as its home.

I'm very nervous about screwing up dropbox and losing data; I'm going to investigate a larger internal hard drive and/or new pc.

Thank you anyway.

Regards, Tony

this morning, for some strange reason, I opted to try again to move the DropBox folder to my ext4 formatted USB HDD..... and it worked!!

Thanks for everyone's comments and help.

Tony

[dhdurgee]

I chose to take a wait-and-see approach to this issue. I kept getting messages and notifications from DropBox, but I ignored them.

Theoretically now, as I understand it, my JFS partition is no longer supported by DropBox and should not be syncing. I am pleased to find that it IS still syncing.

This makes me wonder if perhaps despite all their nagging and warning that any partition with xattr will work. Anyone else decide to wait this out and see?

Dave

[dhdurgee]

Just thought I would post to note that I am still having no problems syncing dropbox on my JFS partition even after a number of dropbox updates. Looking over on the dropbox forums it appears as if others are having problems, so perhaps I am an exception. There was a suggested solution from a consulting firm:

So..... Dropbox has over the last few months been warning about requiring an Ext4 file system to be able to use the linux (Ubuntu) client.. in effect requiring you to use an unencrypted drive (you better be using one..) to store your dropbox content.

Well here is a way to get around it.. (A.k.A. FU Dropbox)

*Create an Ext4 file system on top of your encrypted partition just for drop box.. *

Instructions Below.. (adjust as necessary)

OLDDBLOCATION=~/Dropbox
echo "Stop Dropbox now, press enter when ready"
mv $OLDDBLOCATION $OLDDBLOCATION.old
dd if=/dev/zero of=~/DROPBOX bs=1024 count=2200000
mkfs.ext4 ~/DROPBOX
mkdir $OLDDBLOCATION
sudo mount -t ext4 ~/DROPBOX $OLDDBLOCATION
cd $OLDDBLOCATION
(cd ../$OLDDBLOCATION.old;tar cvf - *) | tar cvf -
echo "Start Dropbox now. note you may have to remove and re-auth the machine for the warnings to go away, press enter when ready"

all done.. just make sure to add the mount to the fstab file

/home/(user)/DROPBOX /home/(user)/Dropbox ext4 defaults 0 2

Any comments on this idea? I also have an NTFS partition handy, but I might still wind up trying this as some are reporting problems with NTFS from linux as well.

Dave

[redlined]

I have also received this notice from DropBox and see no reason for them to REQUIRE an ext4 formatted file system for their folder. My searches on this topic appear to indicate that they will be requiring use of extended attributes to support their new release.

hi All!

dhdurgee, I quoted your reply not to focus on you rather simply because it explains Why they are requiring the change in storage format. Please do not find insult to take personally on this.

Their new requirement is specifically because other file systems do not provide the "extended attributes" they need from file info in order to Best serve all their customers. I suspect these additional file attributes are also reportable in NTFS formatted storage, hence why it may not be such an issue for windows users in general.

Since dropbox is a file sync service, which is saying the user trusts them to make microscopic level updates to files synced with them and in order to do that reliably then they need that extra precise data on the files in order to determine what needs to be sync'd and keep bandwidth use minimal (theirs and yours). I do not use dropbox but did learn recently helping another in forum that FAT, for example, can cause all sorts of headaches in sync or copy if newer sort of settings since FAT (and vFAT, common thumbdrive formatting) does not track Time/Date of file to less than 2 seconds.

In the end, railing against the change will likely amount to no more than barking up the wrong tree. if requirements for ext4 (or NTFS) format file storage for sync operations do not match your desires then other options may be other online (cloud) sync services or setting up your own to local drives (internal, external, networked or NFS, etc) or setup free/inexpensive cloud storage and establish your own sync to this space giving you good access from any device able to connect and run the sync tool of preference.

Hope this helps!

[dhdurgee]

I have also received this notice from DropBox and see no reason for them to REQUIRE an ext4 formatted file system for their folder. My searches on this topic appear to indicate that they will be requiring use of extended attributes to support their new release.

hi All!

dhdurgee, I quoted your reply not to focus on you rather simply because it explains Why they are requiring the change in storage format. Please do not find insult to take personally on this.

Their new requirement is specifically because other file systems do not provide the "extended attributes" they need from file info in order to Best serve all their customers. I suspect these additional file attributes are also reportable in NTFS formatted storage, hence why it may not be such an issue for windows users in general.

Please note that ext4 is only one of many file systems linux uses that support extended attributes and my choice is one of them. If that is the sole reason for this requirement then it shoud be fairly simple for them to determine if extended attributes are supported with their folder and let this be a functional requirement. Thus far, despite receiving notifications every once in a while about sync stopping, I am finding dropbox continuing to sync even after multiple updates to its components.

I was following up on my post simply to let others know that I was still working despite all the hubub about this. I also thought the post showing how to create an ext4 container specifically for dropbox of possible interest to those encountering the issue.

ave

[redlined]

I have also received this notice from DropBox and see no reason for them to REQUIRE an ext4 formatted file system for their folder. My searches on this topic appear to indicate that they will be requiring use of extended attributes to support their new release.

hi All!

dhdurgee, I quoted your reply not to focus on you rather simply because it explains Why they are requiring the change in storage format. Please do not find insult to take personally on this.

Their new requirement is specifically because other file systems do not provide the "extended attributes" they need from file info in order to Best serve all their customers. I suspect these additional file attributes are also reportable in NTFS formatted storage, hence why it may not be such an issue for windows users in general.

Please note that ext4 is only one of many file systems linux uses that support extended attributes and my choice is one of them. If that is the sole reason for this requirement then it shoud be fairly simple for them to determine if extended attributes are supported with their folder and let this be a functional requirement. Thus far, despite receiving notifications every once in a while about sync stopping, I am finding dropbox continuing to sync even after multiple updates to its components.

I was following up on my post simply to let others know that I was still working despite all the hubub about this. I also thought the post showing how to create an ext4 container specifically for dropbox of possible interest to those encountering the issue.

ave

hi dhdurgee, I did fail to look at the dates involved in this thread, thinking entire thing was very recent, my apologies. I hear you on JFS giving the same info for files and agree if dropbox can gather that info then they should. I find it very strange they would have any issue with encrypted storage space, regardless format of drive, as that sets off warning bells for me.

My biggest concern is the ext4 overlay you found advice on setting up sounds scary, if not dangerously easy to mess everything up. I meant no insult to anyones intelligence and understand this new dropbox requirement is less than ideal from all the options they may have but refuse to include. If using paid service with them then they are seriously disappointing, if free then others may offer same or better service with your current setup needs and wants. Sorry about the soapbox preaching back there, lots of dropbox issues lately over this and other hoops they create for users to jump through, it's when I let my wallet walk elsewhere when applicable.

[dhdurgee]

Well, DropBox did the deed late yesterday and released a new client that broke it for me here. I tried to move it to my w7 NTFS partition, only to be told that it was not supported either despite what someone at DropBox support told me a few months ago.

I am also not happy with the above suggested method, so I decided not to go that route and looked for another way. I found a reference to using Dbxfs here:

https://www.ostechnix.com/dbxfs-mount-d ... ment-20860

I thought about this and decided to look a bit further. If in fact I wanted to take this approach I would contact the Gigolo author to see if that was possible with his tool and avoid adding another to my system.

A bit more searching lead me to this solution:

https://github.com/dark/dropbox-filesystem-fix

I downloaded the .zip of the project, used make and make test to confirm operation and tried it.

Dropbox is now back in operation with the current location. Now I just need to make this permanant and forget about the problem.

If you need to give this a shot as well, here is some more details on using this fix:

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/11/h ... -ext4.html

Dave