"Choose a new home for your dropbox" - btrfs no longer supported

[Jophus]

What is Netgear's response to the actions of Dropbox? Thanks.

Hi xxxxxxx,

On November 7, 2018 the Dropbox system requirements are changing. To make sure that your files continue to sync, you’ll need to move your Dropbox folder to a drive that meets the new requirements. 

What to do next

Choose a new location for your Dropbox folder:

• ReadyNAS, Linux 4.4.111.x86_64.1
  
  Move Dropbox to an Ext4 drive

How to move Dropbox

Why this is changing

Newer file systems let us use the latest technology to help keep your files safe and synced in Dropbox.

- The Dropbox Team

[mdgm-ntgr]

Checking with engineering on this.

Do you have Dropbox connected to any other devices using filesystems that Dropbox will no longer support? Wanting to make sure that the emaily you got is relating to your use of Dropbox on the ReadyNAS.

Are you using the in-built Dropbox function from the cloud tab or the 3rd party app from rnxtras.com ?

Obviously some users who are comfortable with SSH and have plenty of RAM could run a VM in VirtualBox but doing so would be unsupported. Hopefully there's a better way than that.

I can see that there's been a lot of feedback provided to Dropbox on their community: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Syncing-and-uploads/Dropbox-client-warns-me-that-it-ll-stop-syncing-...

We switched from using EXT4 in previous products to using the newer filesystem BTRFS. OS6 has always used BTRFS and we have no plans to change to a different filesystem. We released our first ReadyNAS OS6 systems over 5 years ago and the use of BTRFS has become more and more common on Linux machines in the years following.

BTRFS is superior to EXT4 in so many different ways. Features such as CoW (Copy-on-Write), Snapshots, Bit-rot protection, compression and more are very useful and important to many users and users that don't want to use those features don't have to.

We do let you use a range of other cloud providers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.

[Jophus]

I'm using rnxtras version. I have dropbox only on this one linux NAS box. I use windows PC's as clients.  It looks like only my NAS would be affected.

It would be good to get some clarity from Netgear around how existing Dropbox functionality works and if this change will bork OS6's implementation.

If Dropbox change their tune, and OS6 remains supported, I will jump to that from rnx.

[mdgm-ntgr]

In that case it'd be up to the rnxtras.com developer to see what they can do about their 3rd party app if anything. It may end up needing to be discontinued.

Engineering informs me that "The announcement is about the syncing client implemented by Dropbox. Since the Dropbox syncing service in ReadyNAS OS has nothing to do with Dropbox Linux client software and does not depend on it, ReadyNAS is not affected by this announcement."

The Dropbox syncing service in ReadyNAS OS is very different to the rnxtras.com app. The rnxtras.com app uses the Dropbox Linux client software.

[Jophus]

Thanks for clarifying this.  I'll move to the OS6 version rather than the linux client.

Cheers.

[btaroli]

I use the rnxtras version as well, mostly because it supports multiple users much better than older dropbox syncing in ROS. Maybe I'll have to revisit that and consider dumping dropbox as a result. I gather we support more could options now, which is good. Just a question of how many options exist. iCloud would be one I'd consider, but I like dropbox because it's multi-platform.

Oh well, I guess Dropbox decided it was time to follow in Twitter's steps. Sad.

[btaroli]

Yeah, this is exactly what I remembered. One single global login. Nope. Not gonna fly. I have multiple users and actually have them syncing to each our own Dropbox accounts. sigh. So either dropbox gets over it's ext4 obsession or it's dead, Jim. Have to find an alternative. Do ALL the cloud sync setups work that way? One global login?

[btaroli]

So here's what I did on my workstation. Dropbox can stuff it.

# truncate -s 10G Dropbox.ext4
# mke2fs -t ext4 -D Dropbox.ext4
# mount Dropbox.ext4 Dropbox

Of course, there's the issue of getting it to mount at startup. And if using the rnxtras code, you'd need to do this per account. I've not tried this on the NAS just yet. The only dicey part will be adding something to the fstab. As long as ROS doesn't mess with it, I suppose.