On Sun, Oct 21, 2018 at 11:49:40AM +0000, stripes theotoky wrote:
As of November Dropbox are dropping support for Linux file systems other than ext4, as I run zfs this is less than helpful.
I am wondering as a temporary measure until I move to Pcloud if it would be possible to format a 64GB SD card as ext4, copy the contents of my Dropbox folder to it and then mount it at /home/<username>/Dropbox.
yes, entirely possible.
Assuming this works it would leave the system drive as zfs and Dropbox in its own ext4 flashcard.
Are there better ways to do this and if so how?
My partner needs to use dropbox to share files with people at work, and her desktop machine here runs ZFS. When dropbox announced this ext4-only thing a few months ago, I just created a 20GB ZVOL (with "zfs create -V 20G poolname/dropbox"), formatted it as ext4, mounted it as ~/dropbox in /etc/fstab (which is what the dropbox client is configured to use), and chown-ed the mounted fs to her uid & gid. It works without any problems. As far as dropbox (or anything else) is concerned, the mounted fs is an ext4 filesystem no different to any other ext4 fs - a ZVOL is just another block device, one that happens to be provided by a zfs pool. The ZVOL is snapshotted regularly and backed up with 'zfs send' to the "backup" pool on my mail zfs server. It also benefits from the usual ZFS features like error-detection and correction, compression, etc. If it turns out that 20GB isn't enough, the ZVOl can be grown with 'zfs set volsize=...' and the ext4 fs on it can then be resized with 'resize2fs' I didn't bother putting a partition table on the ZVOL but if I had, the ext4 partition would have to be resized with fdisk or similar after resizing the ZVOL but before resizing the ext4 fs.
What will happen with the zfs snapshots that the box takes every minute?
The SD card isn't part of zpool so won't be snapshotted. if you're rsyncing or copying it to ZFS, that's only a read (remember to use the noatime or relatime mount option), not a write so won't affect the SD card's lifespan.
What is the life expectancy of an SD card used like this?
I don't know what kind of write frequency the dropbox client does, and life expectancy aka write endurance depends on the quality of the SD card. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>