21 Oct
2018
21 Oct
'18
10:49 p.m.
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.
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?
What will happen with the zfs snapshots that the box takes every minute?
What is the life expectancy of an SD card used like this?
Thanks in advance
Stripes
--
Stripes Theotoky
-37 .713869
145.050562
21 Oct
21 Oct
11:38 p.m.
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(a)taz.net.au>
28 Oct
28 Oct
11:03 a.m.
On Sunday, 21 October 2018 11:38:06 PM AEDT Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
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.
If you use a ZVOL you can make snapshots of that.
If you use a filesystem other than ZFS or Ext4 you can use a loopback mount,
just create a regular file of a suitable size, run mkfs.ext4, then mount -o
loop.
If you use BTRFS then you can have a loopback ext4 filesystem snapshotted as
part of the subvol that contains it.
This will be more of a problem for Windows users who aren't using NTFS as they
don't have the options for loopback filesystems that we have (I'm running a
corporate Dropbox account and got an email about the Windows users who aren't
using NTFS).
--
My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
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.
10:30 p.m.
On Sun, 28 Oct 2018 at 11:03, Russell Coker via luv-main
<luv-main(a)luv.asn.au> wrote:
If you use a filesystem other than ZFS or Ext4 you can use a loopback mount,
just create a regular file of a suitable size, run mkfs.ext4, then mount -o
loop.
If you use BTRFS then you can have a loopback ext4 filesystem snapshotted as
part of the subvol that contains it.
Hello, mostly I lurk here to learn from everyone else, but in the
interest of technical
correctness, may I chip in with the minor nitpick that loop devices
are not and never
have been "loopback" devices, but somehow it seems that word often gets used
out of context .
The word "loopback" does not appear in mount(8) or losetup(8).
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_device which says:
"Sometimes, the loop device is erroneously referred to as loopback device, but
this term is reserved for a networking device in operating systems. The concept
of the loop device is distinct." And no, I did not write that ... :p
I vaguely remember that there have been some instances of this misuse in kernel
code comments, so it might appear there, and there may have been some effort to
correct that too. But it's not something I've followed closely.
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days inactive
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3 comments
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stripes theotoky