0

I am aware this has been asked before, but the questions and answers I've found are several years old.

Scenario: I have over 40 GB of data in Dropbox. I am getting a new machine with a 240 GB SSD, which will be used to boot Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 10. I want to use Dropbox from both OSs, but the naive solution of hosting a copy of Dropbox in each partition won't work (since the partitions will be quite small and I don't want to duplicate data).

The idea is therefore to host it in a different drive. Two questions must be answered now:

  1. According to Dropbox documentation, storing Dropbox in a different drive than the OS's is dangerous, and one should make sure that the drive is accessible before the application starts. How can this be achieved both in Ubuntu 16.04 and in Windows 10? I have read that Windows 8 corrupts shared NTFS partitions with its fast boot mode, and that it should be disabled for seamless integration. Are there any more caveats?
  2. Although the external partition is bigger and therefore it is less of a problem to store two copies of Dropbox, it still looks like a waste to have duplicate data. How can the two clients share the same directory (in an external partition)? I have seen some tutorials, but they are rather old, and I have read that there are issues which make Dropbox resync every time it boots, despite nothing really being changed.

NOTE: I am aware of Selective Sync, but I like to keep a full local copy of my Dropbox directory for back-up reasons, so simply having two (small) copies of Dropbox inside the SSD doesn't cut it for me.

Improve this question
1
  • If you want to use an external drive, I found that this procedure allows you to create it: it's a tad lengthy, but you need do it only once. I have used it since XP support was withdrawn, and it works fine, except that if the drive goes off-line you need to restart Dropbox once it is on-line again.
    – AFH
    Commented Jun 9, 2016 at 11:32

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

You can use NTFS in Windows 10 and Ubuntu. Ubuntu can read and write to NTFS partitions out of the box. Since you are dual-booting and using the partition in one OS, there shouldn't be an issue with sharing the same directory.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .