Q: Is Dropbox for MIT available on Athena?

Answer

At this time, the Dropbox for Business client is not available on Athena. There are some technical barriers to overcome before we can make Dropbox available on Athena cluster machines, and we're exploring various options.

At this time, if you need access to your MIT Dropbox on Athena, we recommend you use the web interface:

• Visit https://www.dropbox.com/login
• Enter your MIT e-mail address in the "E-mail" field, leave the password field blank, and click "Sign In". You will be redirected to Touchstone and then to your Dropbox folder.

Technical Issues

• Dropbox is designed primarily as a synchronization service. There are various unofficial contributed FUSE clients, but they do not make use of an official Dropbox API, so we need to evaluate them further before installing them.
• The normal Dropbox client cannot be used, because your MIT Dropbox space is larger than your AFS quota, so your Dropbox folder contents cannot be cached in your home directory, thus requiring a full-resynchronization at each login.
• A full resynchronization at each login is not feasible, due to the large amount of data involved, and finite temporary storage.