Hacker News Reader

Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the most important reasons I've kept using Dropbox despite having a much larger storage space on Google Drive or elsewhere. Dropbox once had superior handling of symlinks that deals with plenty of weird edge cases gracefully. I don't think I have any reason to use Dropbox any more.

View on HN

I've honestly wanted to drop Dropbox for a while now. Over the past year or two, it has been becoming a worst product every single time I interact with it and also a lot spammier trying to get me to upgrade to Premium. They put a very low device limit and keep removing features. I honestly don't see any reason to use it over Google Drive anymore.

If you wanted to do something tricky, you could use a FUSE file system passthrough, and disable the showing of symlinks, so that dropbox is unaware of them. something similar to this: https://github.com/skorokithakis/python-fuse-sample/blob/mas...

Syncdocs https://syncdocs.com does proper symlink handling for Google Drive

Didn't they already drop most Linux support?

They announced they were dropping support for several less common filesystems used by Linux, then they decided that was a bad move and recanted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498454

> several less common filesystems

Better make that all the popular non-ext4 filesystems, 2 of which are default filesystems on the 2 major Linux-distributions out there (Red hat & Ubuntu).

What on earth were they thinking?

Including sane defaults, like encryped home directories using encryptfs on ext4.

Did they have to do hoop jumping with potential security ramifications to support those? Is Dropbox on Linux running entirely within the user account or is there a system level component of it with communication to a user level component? If the latter, I could see potential areas that could at least be probed for potential vulnerabilities.

> Better make that all the popular non-ext4 filesystems...

Fair.

I'm sure they knew their numbers exactly. Probably are very few Dropbox users on Linux.

Symlinks work in MacOS too. They're only creatable from the command line (by default) but they work just like they do in Linux.

MS-Windows has them too. You need to use cmd.exe to make them. I use symlinks to keep my configuration files synced in my Nextcloud directory.

Symlinks agent common on Windows, though, as they require administrator access/elevation to create. Junction points are more common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com