Simple script to synchronize a directory in raspberry pi with a Dropbox Application
Setup:
- Create a Dropbox Application and get the token.
- The first time, upload all the files you want to synchronize to the Dropbox application folder. This is important because the first time the script will just download everything from dropbox to local, overwriting whatever you have in there!
- Save the token to a text file ".dropbox_token"
- Put the token file in the root of the raspberry pi folder you want to synchronize.
- Copy this script to that folder and execute it from there, or edit the variable SYNC_DIR in this script.
What does it do?
The first time it gets executed, it will download everything on your dropbox application and create a .dropbox_state file saving the sate. This means it will overwrite local files, get a copy of your latest local files to dropbox before executing this script the first time!.
The next time, it will first compare the files currently in the server with the files in the server saved in the state file. It will synchronize the local files to those currently in the server. Next, it will check if there are changes in the local folders and files and synchronize with the server. This means the server has precedence over the local files.
The synchronization is bi-directional (not the first time the script gets executed!). The script should work both on Linux and Windows. Requires that dropbox python API is installed (you can install it by "pip install dropbox", be sure you are using version 8 at least and that previous versions have been completely removed).
This script is based on an old one I found on github, which was using the APIv1. Unfortunately I could neither find the original script (so I cannot reference it here) nor did I find a script using the Api V2. Therefore I decided to adapt the old script to work with the dropbox APi V2.
It's a bit experimental. Use at your own risk!