14 DAY TRIAL // Dropbox, a client for an online service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere, has received another update for the experimental branch of the client, featuring some more fixes and improvements.
Against all odds, the Dropbox developers haven't yet promoted the experimental branch of the application to stable and continue to push various updates and fixes.
Usually, Linux users don't get a lot of attention from the Dropbox team and the changes to the client for the open source platform are kept to a minimum. That's why there are tons of new features for the Mac OS X and Windows platforms. The way the application works on Linux makes it difficult to get new features, which means that users will have to settle with only small improvements.
The latest Dropbox release comes with a critical fix for an issue that could have caused Linux users to be unlinked during the update process. Also, a rare problem that could cause Dropbox to shut down unexpectedly has been corrected, a rare bug that could cause Dropbox to stop syncing inside shared folders that are renamed repeatedly has been fixed, and a number of fixes have been implemented.
All these fixes sound very good, but you have to understand that this is not a stable version of Dropbox and it's impossible to predict when they will arrive for everyone. If you have encountered any of the problems that might have been patched, you will have to wait for the next major update to actually take advantage of them.
The 2.7.x branch also comes with another very interesting feature that is available in the setup wizard. Users will get a menu for selective sync so they can set up large Dropboxes, so you don't have to download the entire backup if you don't want to.
“Prompt to selective sync in the setupwizard for large Dropboxes – if your Dropbox is more than 10 GB or syncing your Dropbox would fill up most of your remaining hard disk space, we will prompt you to use selective sync to skip syncing some of your folders. Note that this prompt is skipped if you have previously linked this account, as we assume you'll have your selective sync settings from before,” noted the developers in the changelog.
Also, keep in mind that Linux users don't have access to binary files of the latest Dropbox client. This means that you will only get the source file and you will have to compile it by yourself. If you already have another version installed, you will need to purge it and start from the beginning.
Check out the official announcement for more details about this release. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only. Download Dropbox 2.7.51 Experimental for Linux