Dropbox Brings Back Support For ZFS, XFS, Btrfs And eCryptFS On Linux

Dropbox has partially reverted the change of only supporting Ext4 filesystems on Linux. A Dropbox client update brings back support for ZFS and XFS on 64-bit Linux systems, and eCryptFS and Btrfs on all Linux systems.

Dropbox stopped supporting folder syncing to drives with filesystems it deemed uncommon, which on Linux meant anything but Ext4, upsetting quite a few users. The reason cited for this was that "a supported file system is required as Dropbox relies on extended attributes (X-attrs) to identify files in the Dropbox folder and keep them in sync", which doesn't really make sense since there are many filesystems that support X-attrs on Linux.

After this change was announced, various workarounds started to appear online, including one that I posted on Linux Uprising. There was even a new unofficial, open source Dropbox client developed for this reason (which is also much lighter than the official client by the way).

But this didn't last long though, as last week, the Dropbox 77.3.127 beta changelog says that Dropbox has added back support for ZFS (on 64-bit systems only), XFS (on 64bit systems only), Btrfs and eCryptFS.

Since then, it appears that this change has made it into the stable Dropbox client for Linux. This isn't directly mentioned on the Dropbox website, but after a fresh Dropbox installation that I performed on Ubuntu, the reported version is 77.4.131, which is a higher version number than the Dropbox beta version for which it was reported that it now supports ZFS and XFS on 64-bit Linux systems, and eCryptFS and Btrfs on all Linux systems. I also gave it a try on a Btrfs filesystem and folder syncing ran without any issues.

The Dropbox system requirements section has yet to be updated to mention that the Linux client now supports these filesystem types.

via r/Linux (u/XavierCLL)