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Dropbox tip: Delayed start

July 1st, 2011 Comments off

Dropbox is a great utility to have handy, especially since it’s multi-platform and I don’t have to think about it. However, I primarily use a Linux laptop which isn’t always Internet-connected or at least not immediately when I login. This confuses Dropbox significantly since the client cannot find the servers and doesn’t retry. But this is nothing a little shell magic can’t fix.

The client starts up based on ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop, which calls dropbox start -i. Based on this NetworkManagerWifiWorkaround tip, replace the Command in Startup Applications with the following and dropbox will wait until your system successfully can ping www.google.com:

bash -c 'while ! ping -q -w5 -c1 www.google.com; do sleep 5s; done; dropbox start -i'

That’s great, except after some time (I believe a restart of dropbox) the command will revert back. So once you have the right command in ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop open up a terminal and run this command:

sudo chattr +i ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop

So now dropbox will wait for you to be connected, and won’t overwrite your change. If you still don’t use Dropbox check out their tour and then signup with my referral link to get an additional 250MB of space.

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