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Hi, I waited over 12 hours for certain files directly written in Dropbox subfolders to propagate to other devices. Wondering what triggers a sync -- the timestamp? Neither the "touch" command nor a minor edit does the trick.

I did notice, however, that when the permission on a file/directory is changed from 700 to 770 sync happens. So does this mean that the file must be "regular_users" group-readable for syncing to occur?

At the individual level, a sync can be forced by restarting Dropbox -- so any commands at Pythonanywhere which will do the same?

By the way, soft-linking ("ln -s") to the Dropbox sub-folders works great. Can someone kindly confirm whether this technique avoids consuming quota. Thanks very much!

Hey there, yes you've correctly identified the permissions issue - our dropbox sync client runs under a different account, but is a member of the registered_users group, so your files need to be group read/writable for sync to work. We don't have a "bounce dropbox" command for users, but try doing a

find Dropbox/your-shared-folder-name ! -perm -040 -exec chmod g+r {} \;
find Dropbox/your-shared-folder-name ! -perm -020 -exec chmod g+w {} \;

If you still get problems after that, do get in touch and we'll see if we can debug it.

Symlinks shouldn't double-consume your quota, no. For info, whilst symlinks into Dropbox folders from the outside are fine, symlinks inside Dropbox folders currently won't work...

Thanks, harry, for your confirmation. Based on your information, I tested your suggestion on added and deleted files. After waiting 24 hours, it is apparent that the sync to Dropbox is not automatic even with the necessary file permissions.

The good news is that once the chmod command is executed, sync does occur. Here's the details of the script, dropbox_sync.sh Now interestingly, sync will not take hold if a specific directory within Dropbox is given as argument, so just go with the default.

Perhaps the PAW system needs to execute something similar on behalf of all users with non-empty Dropbox folders, say, every 10 minutes.

PS- enjoyed your blog post on dogfood, using PAW service itself to develop PAW Openness is wonderful attribute!

Glad it worked! You're right, maybe we should automate the chmod g+rw somewhow... will look into it!

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Hi mef,

I've manually made that change to your account. Should be working now.

Hello

I am having the same problem. Any chance I can get you to manually change mine?

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My Dropbox isn't syncing either and I do not have permissions on ~/Dropbox. Please delete the folder for me. I've unshared my folders on the Dropbox end but will re-enable after.

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Also, if you really want to try "deleting" your folders, make sure you un-tick the box that says "allow others to keep a copy of my files". Otherwise the folder won't be deleted from your Dropbox on our servers, and then you won't be able to re-share.

I have all my Dropbox stuff in one folder called "pythononline" but when I tried to change permissions I got a long list of:

chmod: changing permissions of ‘/home/rcooke/Dropbox/pythononline/premierDME/db_OLD.sqlite’: Operation not permitted

That looks like it's OK in your case; the files are owned by the Dropbox user so they should be syncing.