Dropbox backup insanely slow

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Smartware backup to dropxbox is painfully slow. I’ve left the machine running for days and only managed 10 gbs.

My upload speed is 10+ mbps (verified on speedtest.net).

My initial backup is only one-quarter done.

How can I get dropbox backup to speed up?

Other question:

Backup to my passport has option of  continuous backup or schduled backup. Dropbox does not - but maybe this is because the first backup hasn’t finished.

Thanks in advance.

2

Hi there and welcome tot he WD community.

Perhaps this could be because its the first backup, normally this can take time on a passport, but i have not tried this with Dropbox lets see if another user can share some tips and information on this matter.

3

Well it’s been a week now and the initial backup still hasn’t finished. I doubt that it’s going to complete now. It’s been stuck for ages on 42 of 46 Gb

Backup to My Passport is great. Backup to Dropbox is unusable.

As a test, I copied the whole 46 Gb of data to directly to Dropbox. It took only a few hours.

I figure the best option is to use WD Smartware to backup to My passport and find a way to sync dropbox with the archived passport files via symlinks.

Is there a method of getting direct WD support on this issue?

thanks

4

Hi, if you wan to contact WD support, click on  this link and it will give you the options.

5

sort of…the problem is that the WD call to the Dropbox API is using 4mb “chunks” of file…Dropbox can take up to 150mb chunks. This means the NAS is calling dropbox over and over and over and over for large files…each call is an https post …this is something that should be configurable. I connected via ssh and can see what its doing, but cannot find any config files, etc that control the chunk size. THIS is the cause of the ridiculously slow speed youre seeing.

6

Did you found a solution?

7

No. Finally out of desperation I installed Raspian on a raspberry pi I had
unused. I mounted the WD as NFS to the raspberry pi.

There is a fantastic bit of software out there you can use to backup from
the raspberry pi to Dropbox and other services. It runs on windows and
other platforms as well. It’s fantastic and reliable. The WD supplied
dropbox integration is a joke.

Good luck.
Scott

8

Thank you I will find an alternative because I buy the WD My Cloud because this come with the Dropbox integration.

9

Hi @sjgray8 I’m struggling with the same issue with Dropbox App on my MyCloud at the moment.

Re your workaround to use a Raspberry Pi and mount the WD as NFS, does dropbox software work properly int hat case? I thought there was something about file update notifications not being passed over network connections, so that network drives synced with Dropbox don’t work properly?

If it worked across a network then I could use my Mac laptop with dropbox software on that couldn’t I, to sync the WD network drive to dropbox?

10

I dont use the dropbox software…I use rclone installed on the WD itself.

The call the rclone script via cron. No issues to date. This thread is
pretty old and I havent updated firmware in forever, so unsure if anything
changed.

1 Like
11

Thanks @sjgray8, unfortunately I don’t know how to install rclone on the device - it doesn’t have apt-get. Reading the forums it looks like this was dropped in recent firmware versions…

Do you have any guidance on how to do this? Or even a simple pointer in the right direction. I’m not at a level to recompile kernels etc but I know my way around apt-get okay.

12

https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-v1.36-linux-arm.zip

use curl to download to the NAS. unzip and have fun. Doc is on the rclone
site.

Scott

1 Like