Dropbox Nov 2018 workaround

So Dropbox is no longer supporting anything besides ext4 on linux as of Nov 7th 2018.  Here's how to work around that WITHOUT superuser permissions.


First, create a sparse file of whatever size you'd like for your Dropbox folder.
$ truncate -s 5G ~/.Dropbox.img

Now we need to format this as ext4, But we want to make sure that we own the created file system, not the default of root.
$ mkfs.ext4 -E root_owner=$(id -u $USER):$(id -g $USER) ~/.Dropbox.img

Setup the loopback device with our EXT4 image
$ udisksctl loop-setup -f ~/.Dropbox.img

You may need to mount the device if it hasn't been already:
$ udisksctl mount -b $CREATED_LOOP_DEVICE

Check where our filesystem is mounted:
$ mount | grep Dropbox.img

Move any existing data from the previous dropbox folder to the new location:
$ mv ~/Dropbox/{.,}* /$MOUNTPOINT/OF/DROPBOX/IMAGE/UUID$

Link our new folder back to the dropbox folder
$ ln -s  /$MOUNTPOINT/OF/DROPBOX/IMAGE/UUID$/ ~/Dropbox

You can now start dropbox and sync away, the device will need to be mounted before dropbox is started.

Here's a script that could be used to set this up every time before dropbox is run:

 #!/usr/bin/env bash  
 #Dropbox local loopback file system workaround  
 LOOPFILE=$HOME/.Dropbox.img  
 LOOPSIZE=5G  
 #Check if the loopback file exists  
 if [ ! -f $LOOPFILE ]; then  
      # Create the loopback file  
      truncate -s 5G $LOOPFILE  
      # Create the filesystem  
      mkfs.ext4 -E root_owner=$(id -u $USER):$(id -g $USER) $LOOPFILE  
      #setup the loopback device  
      LOOPDEVICE="$(udisksctl loop-setup -f $LOOPFILE | awk '{print $5}' | sed 's/.$//')"  
      #Check if our loop file is mounted  
      if [ ! $(mount | grep -q $LOOPFILE) ]; then  
           #mount our loop file  
           udisksctl mount -b $LOOPDEVICE  
      fi  
      # get our mount point  
      MOUNT="$(mount | grep Dropbox.img | awk '{print $3}')"  
      # Move any existing data from our original folder to the new location  
      mv ~/Dropbox/{.,}* $MOUNT  
      # Remove the old Dropbox folder  
      rmdir ~/Dropbox  
      # Link the new mount to our Dropbox folder  
      ln -s  $MOUNT ~/Dropbox  
 else  
      # Check if our loop has been created  
      if [ ! $(udisksctl dump | grep -q test) ]; then  
           #setup the loopback device  
           LOOPDEVICE="$(udisksctl loop-setup -f $LOOPFILE | awk '{print $5}' | sed 's/.$//')"  
      fi  
      #Check if our loop file is mounted  
     if [ ! mount | grep -q $LOOPFILE ]; then  
           #Find the loop file  
           LOOPDEVICE="$(udisksctl dump | grep -e ' Device:.*loop.*\| BackingFile:' | grep -B1 $LOOPFILE | head -1 | awk '{print $2}')"  
          #mount our loop file  
         udisksctl mount -b $LOOPDEVICE  
     fi  
 fi  
 # now launch dropbox  
 dropbox