Dropbox restores Linux support in new client beta

Dropbox has walked back its November 2018 decision to stop working with filesystems popular among Linux users.

That decision saw the sync ‘n’ share giant decide not to support “uncommon” filesystems, leaving it happy to work with just NTFS for Windows, HFS+ or APFS for Mac and Ext4 for Linux.

Developers and Linux users were not happy.

But their frowns can now turn upside-down, as a support note for the forthcoming Dropbox version 77 client update published today says it will “add support for ZFS (on 64-bit systems only), eCryptFS, XFS(on 64-bit systems only), and Btrfs filesystems in Linux.”

The post doesn’t explain Dropbox’s reasons for the change, but it’s not hard to guess its reasons.

Dropbox’s ambition is to have integrations with its platform become part of enterprise workflows.

Doing that means offering tools that developers favour.

And as the majority of servers now run Linux, that means supporting file systems common among Linux users.