Linux – How to sync dropbox folders to a Raspberry Pi

arch linuxdropboxraspberry pisynchronization

I have been using a script that uses curl to sync dropbox folders to a Raspberry Pi. Cron calls the script every hour to retrieve most of the folders.

Can anyone recommend a better solution, maybe one that checks if the folder has changed since the last sync.

I don't want to install the official dropbox app because it requires many dependencies and I'm running a very lightweight Arch distribution.

Best Answer

A good alternative to Dropbox might be Synchthing, which syncs one or several folders between a cluster of machines (even some mobile phones).

More information about running Synchthing on Arch Linux can be found on the Arch Linux wiki page on exactly this topic.

I have used Syncthing to sync the NetBSD pkgsrc repository between several geographically distant machines (this a few gigabytes and more than 200000 files).

Related Solutions

Ssh – Getting Dropbox to sync over SSH

There is a dropbox command line tool that allows you to perform all sorts of tasks, including stopping and starting dropbox.

You could include a short snippet in your .profile or .bash_profile (depending on what you use), that checks if dropbox is already running, and if not, starts it:

~/bin/dropbox.py running
[ $? -eq 0 ] && ~/bin/dropbox.py start

Syncing multiple home folders with dropbox and symlinks

Is there really no possible way to specify which directory you want Dropbox to operate on? You can't just tell Dropbox to use /home?

If not, you could try skipping symlinks entirely and use several bind mounts to accomplish this. In other words:

mount --bind /home /Dropbox

on both computers.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ssh – Getting Dropbox to sync over SSH

Syncing multiple home folders with dropbox and symlinks

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