Beware of the dropbox daemon in archives

Shell Scripting & Linux Command Line
1

I had an old installation of Debian 8 (Jessie) on my HDD, kept just as a fallback. I decided to archive it and free the disk space.

So I first made a Clonezilla backup, then I made a bootable full install copy on 32Gb USB drive.
Tested the USB drive with a boot, and it fails to run? Hangs in the gdm Display Manager screen with no mouse pointer.
So I mounted the USB drive from another Linux, and disabled gdm, suspecting that was at fault.
Then boot again, and I get a terminal login prompt, login and everything seems OK… until I try startx… then the same thing… brings up the Gnome screen with no mouse pointer.
Much head scratching and fiddling with /etc/fstab to make sure things are mounting properly. No progress… Then suddenly in one trial boot, a firefox window comes up with a message about dropbox requiring a new authentication or something, and still no mouse pointer…

Here at last is a clue. Mount the USB drive and disable the dropbox daemon. Boot again, and behold It all works, I even have a mouse pointer. Put gdm back , and that works too.

So I am happy with my archive now
but
can anyone explain why dropbox was perfectly happy in Debian 8 on my HDD, but the moment I moved Debian 8 to a USB drive on the same computer, dropbox complained about some rubbish and disabled my mouse pointer for good measure?

I dont see the link between dropboxd and the mouse pointer?

3 Likes
2

Me neither though I don’t use Dropbox as a app, as I find files upload too slowly.
Instead I login online through Firefox and upload from there. The problem with Dropbox, is that even though essentially you’re backing up stuff, but if you’re using the Desktop app or file manager app, then you’re filling up your hard drive with the stuff you want to backup or keep. At least after uploading directly to Dropbox through Firefox or any other browser of choice, you’re able to either remove said backup thing, or move it to another drive away from your main OS.

2 Likes
3

I must try that, it sounds better… I used to use dropbox a lot between a tablet and the PC, but there are other ways of doing that like bluetooth or Wifi. Its also useful a a quick backup of work on the PC.

4

aren’t the files stored locally “tokenised” so they are not in their raw state?
I know that’s the case with Box…

5

No they are still in their raw state. Unless of course they’ve changed that now?
I’d rather upload through whatever browser, rather than using their app.

6

Just as a matter of interest, how do you achieve that?

7

Go to Dropbox website login to your account, then click upload.
Choose whether it’s a file or folder.
You can even create a folder to put said thing you’re uploading into.

1 Like