How to keep using Dropbox even if you don’t use unencrypted ext4 (workaround) – Your nested Bubble

Backup! (not really a backup, but we make way) ~ $ mv Dropbox Dropbox.bak ~ $ mkdir Dropbox Verify the contents of Dropbox.bak! A backup is only a backup if you can restore your data. Create your loopback file I am sizing it 150% of my Dropbox allowance, 3072MB, since I am only using the free version. This might be tougher if you are using a paid version with lots of potential storage. It is possible to expand this file later, a Google search for expand ext4 loopback should yield viable results. ~ $ dd if=/dev/zero of=~/.dropbox/storage bs=1M count=3072 create an ext4 filesystem Become root, which is usually done by issuing sudo su or su and enter the appropriate password. It should be obvious that you replace by your actual username from this moment on. mkfs.ext4 /home//.dropbox/storage optional: prevent writes when not mounted As Jason Lewis pointed out in the comments, you can prevent accidental writes to /home//Dropbox, when the loopback device is not mounted. This is completely optional, but probably a smart thing to do. To set the “immutable”-bit, still as root, do: chattr +i /home//Dropbox mount it To mount the filesystem, add this line to your /etc/fstab. /home//.dropbox/storage /home//Dropbox ext4 defaults,user_xattr,loop 0 0 and mount with: ~ # mount /home//Dropbox/ Fix permissions The folder might belong root, we can fix that by executing: ~ # chown -R : /home//Dropbox ~ # exit Please note, that is usually your username, but it might differ. To find out what to put there, simply execute ls -l in your homefolder and examine the results. Restore your Dropbox contents ~ $ cp -a Dropbox.bak/* Dropbox/