Sharing a Dropbox folder with Host & Guest OS (Virtual Box)

Question

I am using VirtualBox on Windows 7 with Ubuntu as a guest OS. I have installed the Guest OS Additions and know how to share folders and automatically mount them.

My question is out of pure curiosity. What would happen if I set my Dropbox folder in Ubuntu to be the exact same folder/share as in Windows. Would this cause any problems with syncing with the server?

I suppose I can test it out myself in the VM, since I can always revert any changes I make. But I am curious if anyone else has tried this. If there were no problems, would it be a good idea?

EDIT: After thinking about it, the best option would probably be to use the Windows Dropbox folder in the Ubuntu VM, but let Windows take care of the syncing. Dropbox would not need to be installed/running in the VM in this case.

Answer 1

I recently tried the same thing, and my conclusion is the like the one you describe in your edit. I did get a lot of revisions quickly when having Dropbox installed on both the host as on the guest. This will show up in the version history of files that were accessed by both machines at the same time (I happened to be testing the Linux and Windows version of an application concurrently), so there was a ping-pong of "Modified on machine Host" and "Modified on machine Guest" messages. All these versions aren't really an issue of course, but it also isn't a pretty thing to do (both on your own network connection, as to Dropbox' servers).

So as you said as well: when the host has Dropbox installed and running, it will detect all changes you do in the guest, as it is the very same data that is being modified. The issue is made more clear if you would have a Windows guest: in that case, the shared folders will show up as a networked/shared directory. Using Dropbox on that folder from the guest in that case would've likely raised some eyebrows...