How to mount Dropbox folder as virtual file system?

Without a doubt Dropbox is one of the most popular file storage services right now. There are various Dropbox apps available for Linux that can be used on different Linux distributions to sync your folder.

Meanwhile today we will talk about the process to mount the Dropbox folder locally on our system so you can easily sync the folder, upload and / or download your files within the folder between your system and Dropbox.

In order to perform this task we are going to make use of an excellent utility, which is named Dbxfs

Dbxfs is a utility used to mount the Dropbox folder locally as a virtual file system on Unix-like operating systems.

While the Dropbox client is easy to install on Linux, this approach differs slightly from the official method.

It is a command line Dropbox client and does not require disk space to access. The Dbxfs application is free, open source, licensed under the GPLv3, and written in Python.

Dbxfs will allow us to mount your Dropbox folder as if it were a local file system. It differs from the official Dropbox client in two main ways:

1. The first and most important of them is that it is necessary to have an internet connection for access.
2. No disk space is required for access, but will be cached if disk space is available

dbxfs has been tested on OpenBSD, Linux, and macOS, but it should run on any POSIX system that provides a FUSE-compliant library or has the ability to mount SMB shares.

Windows support is coming very soon. It runs on non-x86 architectures like ARM. It does not require a specific file system.

How to mount Dropbox folder in Ubuntu and derivatives with Dbxfs?

To be able to carry out this work we will follow the instructions below. The first thing we are going to do is open a terminal with Ctrl + Alt + T and execute the following commands in it.

We have to have the FUSE library installed on the system, we do this by typing:

sudo apt install libfuse2

Done this now We are going to install the dbxfs utility on the system with the help of the Python package manager:

pip3 install dbxfs

In case of not having Python installed, we can obtain it with:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

Already with everything you need installed in our system, now we are going to create a folder which will serve as an intermediate point between Dropbox and our system.

They can create it from your file manager or with the mkdir command, in this case we are going to use the command and give the folder the name we want.

mkdir ~/Volumen_Virtual

Now we are going to use dbxfs to tell you to use this folder, at all times we must indicate the path of the folder in this case ~ / refers to our main directory "home". We are going to type in the terminal:

dbxfs ~/Volumen_Virtual

Generating access to Dropbox

When executing this command, we will be asked to generate an access token to our Dropbox account, which we can do simply by going to the URL that the terminal shows us.

Just click on it by pressing the control key and clicking on the link, here it will take us to a window in our browser that will request access "Allow to authenticate access to Dropbox".

They must be logged into their Dropbox account to complete the authorization process.

A new authorization code will be generated on the next screen. Copy the code back to your terminal and paste it at the cli-dbxfs prompt to finish the process.

Then it will ask us if you want to save this access for future occasions and we will respond they are Y (yes) or N (no). In case of denying this, we must carry out this process every time we restart the computer or close the user session.

Finally, click Y to accept. Once this is done we will be able to see that we have mounted the folder in the system with the files of our account.