I am absolutely sick of Windoze and I’m trying out Linux Mint for my work computer. This has been a bit of a learning curve but I have almost everything working the way I want… but the sticking point is my company uses Dropbox for all file sharing and repository.

I first naively installed Dropbox from the Software Installer but that tried to sync the entire company (many TBs) to my computer. It seems there is no Smart Sync option.

Next I installed Rclone and logged in using that, but it seems to be completely command line based which is absolutely useless. There is no way I’m going to sit here typing out full directory paths and file names every time I need to access something (which is always). I then installed RcloneBrowser, and later the Rclone web GUI, however they BOTH skip the parent folder and put me directly one level down, which is also useless.

Ok I know what you’re thinking. I need to create an alias, right? So I did, and my config file now has the lines

[DB]

type = alias

remote = Dropbox:/

but this makes no difference in the web GUI or RcloneBrowser! The frustrating thing is if I use the command line the results I get are:

rclone lsd Dropbox:/ parent directory. Good so far…

rclone lsd DB: parent directory! Yay! So why doesn’t this work on either GUI???

If I can’t get this to work then I will have to get rid of Linux unfortunately. I can see in many forums I am not the first to have massive issues with Dropbox, but it seems the alias approach works for everyone else. What am I doing wrong?

  • gornius@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    7 months ago

    Rclone can mount remotes to your local filesystem. mkdir -p $HOME/mymount && rclone mount dropbox:/ $HOME/mymount, and now you can use mymount, as any regular directory.

      • dellish@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        You guys are awesome. I’m still a total noob at this so I’ve written a bash script to do the mount with all the vfs options I want (just so I don’t have to type it all out every time). One day I’ll figure out how to include it in fstab or systemd but for now it works. Thanks for the help!

  • neatchee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    7 months ago

    I don’t have an answer for you, unfortunately, but I’m just gonna say that using Dropbox as a company’s primary file store is one of the signs of apocalypse or something. I’d consider quitting just for that xD

    I know that’s not helpful 🤷

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      looks

      Hmm. Their protocol apparently doesn’t use end-to-end encryption, which doesn’t sound good. Yeah, I think that if I trusted an external party to host my files, I’d want to retain control over the keys.

      Is that what you were referring to, or to something else?

      • neatchee@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        I was mostly being snarky, but their security is mediocre and their user experience is meh. But I’m also in software where revision control systems are A Thing™ so I’m probably biased

  • M500@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    Dropbox has a smart sync option in Linux.

    I’m in Linux mint and installed Linux from the terminal.

    In the task bar, I can right click on Dropbox and pull up the settings in there, there is a smart sync option.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    Next I installed Rclone and logged in using that, but it seems to be completely command line based which is absolutely useless. There is no way I’m going to sit here typing out full directory paths and file names every time I need to access something (which is always).

    I don’t know what file browser you particularly like using. I haven’t used Dropbox (or Mint, for that matter), but it looks like there are various file browsers that have Dropbox support out there.

    If you’re using the Cinnamon desktop version of Mint, it looks like the default file browser is called “nemo”. Mint appears to have a package with nemo Dropbox integration called “nemo-dropbox”.