Maestral- a better Dropbox client

General system Applications
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For any who care, I have recently installed and now am using Maestral as my Dropbox client. It consumes about 75% of the memory the regular Dropbox client consumes and runs some 80% faster. I have used Maestral for a year plus on Debian.

The code is available in AUR simply install using the following:

yay maestral_qt

CAVEAT: do NOT run Dropbox client and maestral simultaneously. You’ll find that warning hidden somewhere…

Here’s the github:
https://github.com/samschott/maestral -and-

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Good to know. I’ve wondered about trying it out. My business partner will only use Dropbox and it’s been too difficult to convince them to use a FOSS alternative like Nextcloud.

I may have to give this a try. The most up to date Dropbox client is a flatpak, which I’m not very keen on and alone it regularly uses 2+ GB of RAM.

Thanks for sharing.

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FWIW on my gear the native Dropbox client uses about 1GB of RAM. Maestral uses about 500GB.

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Thanks. I suspect part of the reason why it uses so much for me is constantly syncing new and updated documents and directories all day long. But I think I’ll give this a try.

From what I read, Dropbox doesn’t even recognize maestral as a client, so it doesn’t count towards your app limit.

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@manyroads Well, my first observation is that it builds very quickly, so that’s always nice.

Setup was also very quick and easy.

Let’s see how this goes! So far, it seems positive.

Edit: Removing the dropbox flatpak cleaned up nearly 6GB of useless cruft lying around in the background! That’s a brilliant win in my opinion.

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FWIW on my gear the native Dropbox client uses about 1GB of RAM. Maestral uses about 500GB.

500 GB - that’s a lot of RAM :rofl:

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Yep… that should have been 500MB. Uppps

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I tried to use it in pinebook pro, https://www.lorenzobettini.it/2023/03/using-dropbox-on-a-pinebook-pro-with-maestral/ , since Dropbox doesn’t provide an arm client… it worked well, but, despite the selective sync folder, the first time it wants to index all the Dropbox contents and it took ages…

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I have seen significantly different behaviour. The syncs have all been days shorter for me than when I use Dropbox. My Dropbox syncs (new syncs in all cases) take as much as 5 days… Maestral is performing them in under 8 hours.

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The problem in my case is that I only sync a few directories (though on Dropbox I have tons of files). With the Dropbox client it takes minutes for the initial sync. With maestral it takes more than one hour…

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Interesting. I would have to agree with @manyroads, this was many, many times faster for me. It took about an hour to sync about 500gb of files for me. Even with a 1GB up/down fibre internet connection, the official Dropbox would take hours to sync that. It would take anywhere from 6-20 minutes just to upload a single document.

So far, I’m really happy with it.

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I guess this all just proves YMMV…

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@manyroads @lorebett It’s situations like this where I wonder how much of it has to do with hardware, networking, ISP and so much more.

I’d safely wager that we all have drastically different computer hardware, different Internet access, different locations from Dropbox servers and so much more.

Thereby, making each of our experiences different from another.

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I tried that some time ago, so things might have been improved. I’ll have to try again. Moreover, pinebook pro is not the fastest machine on earth :wink:

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