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When my local storage /dev/sda1 is almost taken, I would like to increase the size of a partition using storage space I have in the cloud e.g. dropbox, google drive or similar. Is it possible to do something like that?

For example I have 100 GB local SSD storage 98 % full and 50 GB on a dropbox space that is mounted and visible to my operating system as a filesystem. Shouldn't it be possible to merge these partitions as one big 150 GB partition? I don't know any app that can do it but I should be possible.

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    I think that is not possible, a partition indicates that it is ONE drive. You can download the Dropbox program and moun the Dropbox folder as a extra drive in Windows.
    – mpboom
    Mar 7, 2016 at 7:16
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    Isn't the Dropbox folder mirrored onto your computer if you install the client (and the folder is not excluded from Sync?). Therefore, every MB you put into your Dropbox folder is on your local computer as well as on the cloud?! Mar 7, 2016 at 7:22
  • Thank you for the comments. It is good to know that there seems to be no obvious way to allow my partition to grow beyond its size even though I have other storage areas. What I would like is something like partition magic could merge 2 different partitions but instead I would like it to merge a local drive with an online storage, maybe I could build my own such a service combining a local program that creates a virtual drive that is the combination of 2 different storage drives. Mar 7, 2016 at 7:31
  • @daniel.neumann In the case of dropbox or any specific provider I don't know the details. I was just using dropbox as an example. For an experiment, it would also work to add a physical USB drive to the computer and thereby increase the storage of my /dev/sda1 partition that I would like to grow. Mar 7, 2016 at 7:34

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First, you cannot merge partitions unless they are on the same physical device and are next to each other. For example, if your sda is 320 GB, and you have an sda2 after sda1, then it is possible to merge these two.

Second, online services like Google Drive and Dropbox are not partitions. Currently, there doesn't seem to be an obvious way that space from these providers can be mapped/mounted locally directly. The current synchronization solution is to keep a copy of all files in cloud services locally, which ultimately takes your local space too. It is not possible to merge this kind of space with sda1.

I believe the best option for you is to merge sda1 with sda2 or any partition that is right after it. However, if sda1 is the only partition you have on your sda, nothing can be done to add space to it. One workaround is to add an HDD, and mount a partition on that drive (say, sdb1) at some mount point where you have a lot of data, e.g. /home or /usr. You may want to refer to https://askubuntu.com/questions/656/how-to-move-usr-to-a-new-partition.

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