When I upgraded from Fedora 23 to Fedora 24, Dropbox stopped syncing properly (on both my work desktop and my home desktop). When I did a clean install of Fedora 24 on a new laptop and a “clean” install of Dropbox using the command line instructions on Dropbox’s website, I experienced arguably worse issues.

I did a lot of Googling and a lot of searching for solutions and had a hard time with it.  I really wanted to install from the command line and use the repository directly from the get-go.

However, I ultimately gave up on that approach.  I ended up downloading the .rpm file directly from Dropbox (same link as above) and installing from there.  Then I was finally able to use the dropbox command in the terminal (documentation here) to start and configure the daemon.

I found the whole ordeal frustrating. Dropbox worked fine in Fedora 23 – why didn’t it just keep working after the OS upgrade?  Why didn’t the wget command approach work?  Most important, why didn’t any of these failed implementations of Dropbox flag any error to let me know that they’d failed?  Once I got it so that I could see the contents of my folder in /home/user/Dropbox every time I logged in, I assumed it was working.  It’s a reasonable assumption to make, but as we all know, sometimes assumptions are dangerous.  Luckily, I wasn’t working on anything terribly important in the last few weeks.  And once I realized on each machine that Dropbox was not running in the background and syncing my folder, I could use the browser interface until I got it working again.  AND AT LEAST DROPBOX HAS INTEGRATION WITH LINUX.  I am so furious with Google Drive that I’ve mostly stopped using it.  Last year I was completely dependent on Google Drive, but it became increasingly frustrating to not have it integrated with my desktop file systems.  So, over the summer while I’ve had more free time to explore other cloud storage solutions, I’ve been weaning myself off of it.

This short blog post is to remind myself of the “fix” in case I ever encounter this problem again with Dropbox.  Or, to help others if they come across this post looking for a solution to a similar problem.  I guess “follow the recommended installation instructions on the official website” isn’t a terribly innovative solution.  But I need to remind myself that it’s okay to use the recommended approach over the command line approach.