Dear Tony,

Thank you for your suggestions. I will go for a VM to sync the Dropbox folder. I always wanted to look into Docker, but I need a quick solution now. Since my employer and co-workers use Dropbox, I am stuck with Dropbox for now.

Best wishes,

Robert

No you're right about offsite backup. I use NextCloud just for sharing files and syncing them across devices. Not for backup. That is why I said it was a bit different.

The attraction of dropbox and similar was having an off-site backup. No security concerns for me as all the Gigs of material is family history related gleaned from public domain sources - so happy to store on a server that I have no control over. The value to me is in the many hours it took searching and collecting...

Correct me if I have this wrong - but I believe NextCloud uses your own private server for storage - so not quite as good a backup against data loss in the event of a recovery required after a disaster...

This is pretty fatal for RHEL/Centos/ClearOS users with RHEL's update policy of not bumping bigger version numbers, but back-porting patches into earlier versions so Dropbox are cutting out the whole branch of Linus users. Ext4 is another problem as the default filesystem in 7.x is XFS.

I have seen a lot a frustration on the internet,but Dropbox don't seem to want to listen. I've seen possible solution such as UA spoofing for glibc and mounting an ext4 filesystem as a loop device in a current filesystem.

Apparently in the Ubuntu world they use ext4 with an encryption layer on top by default. That does not work either but Dropbox don't care.

it looks like it is time to find something else. I'm OK as I don't use it and I am experimenting with NextCloud - similar but different, I believe.

This has been known for over 2 months now and has led to a lot of frustrated customers...
see this long thread https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Syncing-and-uploads/Dropbox-client-warns-me-that-it-ll-stop-syncing-in-Nov-why/td-p/290058 and ideas therein...

Some options are
1. Use something other than dropbox - they obviously don't want your business, nor those that run Redhat rhel or CentOS...
2. Run Dropbox containerized in Docker
3. Create a supported VM and use it
4. Maybe https://github.com/rianhunter/dbxfs - iffy
5. Search the internet

Since there is a supported system here (current Fedora with ext4) - then will use that to sync with dropbox and then use unison to keep the ClearOS folders updated... then look for something-else...

They gave the reason for ext4 support in that they required file systems that support X-attrs - and completely ignored the fact that xfs provided the same X-attrs support - clowns.