How to change the Dropbox default directory location

As stated in the Dropbox documentation, is not a good idea to use it over a mounted partition. This is a problem in case your /home doesn’t reside physically on your host. In this post I will show how to change the Dropbox default directory location. I did it on CentOS7 and I guess that can work on Fedora and also on Debian based OS (I’m assuming that you are using a 64bit device).

Choose the new destination

I choose to store my Dropbox files in the /media folder. Prepare your new home executing those commands:

sudo mkdir -p /media/dropbox-youruser/
sudo chown youruser /media/dropbox-youruser/
sudo chmod 700 /media/dropbox-youruser/

Install Dropbox

Dropbox will be installed in the /opt directory

cd /tmp/
curl -Lo dropbox-linux-x86_64.tar.gz https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64
sudo mkdir -p /opt/dropbox
sudo tar xzfv dropbox-linux-x86_64.tar.gz --strip 1 -C /opt/dropbox

Now we need to run manually the dropbox deamon for the first time in order to authenticate it.

export HOME=/media/dropbox-youruser/; /opt/dropbox/dropboxd

Insert you Dropbox user and password in the browser, done!
Now you know the trick, changing the env var HOME to our new location allow us to play Dropbox.

Keep it syncing at each startup

That’s not the end! Unless if you want to run manually the daemon at each startup! Dropbox comes with the option:

☐ Start Dropbox on System startup

But this will not fetch the proper env home We will create instead a systemd deamon to keep it alive

sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/dropbox.service

[Unit]
Description=Dropbox daemon

After=syslog.target network.target sockets.target


[Service]
Restart=always

Environment=HOME=/media/dropbox-youruser/


ExecStart=/opt/dropbox/dropboxd

Save and quit then:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start dropbox

Then run this command to configure the service to start when your device boots:

sudo systemctl enable dropbox