Wednesday, September 5, 2018

sync - Excessive Resource Use in Syncing Home Folders with Dropbox

My situation is that I work close to equally from home and from my workplace's office, and I'm attempting to set up two Ubuntu virtual machines that stay mostly synced with each other. I'm primarily concerned with syncing preferences and files, as I won't change software packages enough to justify attempting to sync that to.




My solution was to set up dropbox on both VMs, and create file links from my user home folder into the dropbox folder. The dropbox folder exists in a different directory, with appropriate file permissions, that's not contained by my user's home folder. My VMs are also the same ubuntu version (12.04 64 bit). As far as I can tell the syncing part works correctly.



My problem is that dropbox seems to be caught in some kind of recursive situation where it's constantly attempting to sync files that are constantly changing between the two machines. This is most obvious in the data use, as after having had dropbox installed and the VM running for about four days, I started the VM this morning and it's already used 1.5gb of bandwidth to sync a home folder that's only 440mb or so. Dropbox also runs 60% or more CPU use constantly.



My question that you guys can answer is what ubuntu related files and folders should I add to the dropbox ignore list so it's not constantly syncing files that change regularly, but are irrelevant to my needs? Is there an error/message log someplace that I should ignore or anything like that?

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