Powerful Dropbox Client for Linux

Dropbox for Linux

Dropbox is one of the storage providers with a Linux client, but their Smartsync technology has never made it over. ExpanDrive is still the most powerful Dropbox client for Linux that supports a full range of powerful Dropbox features. It runs on Ubuntu, Red Hat, Linux Mint, CentOS, Debian and most other popular distributions. ExpanDrive is currently shipping a a desktop app and a server edition for Linux and Windows Server.

Download ExpanDrive for Linux v2023.4.1
Released April 10th, 2023

ExpanDrive runs similarly to a network drive making your content available on-demand. You can configure ExpanDrive to mount the root of your Dropbox account, or map it to a specific folder. In addition to a Linux client, ExpanDrive also runs on Mac and Windows and supports customization and enterprise distribution to help you deploy into large organizations.

Advantages over sync

Sync clients eat up large amounts of storage, keeping copies of all the files you might have access to locally rather than leaving them in the cloud and only downloading them on-demand. If you’re on the road with limited storage on your laptop, this takes up valuable space and bandwidth – often for files you don’t need.

Additionally, this method of access scales poorly as your organization grows in headcount and file count. Using ExpanDrive as a native client to map a network drive to Dropbox lets you have the best of both worlds.

Getting started – Download ExpanDrive

Desktop based installations

ExpanDrive ships primarily as a desktop app with a user interface for advanced configuration and management. We also have a server edition that runs headless for Windows and Linux Servers.

Debian and Ubuntu based desktop distributions

For Debian and Ubuntu based distributions the easiest way to get started is to download and install the latest .deb package (64 bit), either through the graphical installer or via the command-line with the following command.

sudo apt install ./ExpanDrive_2023.4.1_amd64.deb

Installing the .deb will also automatically install the apt repository and code signing key to enable easy update using the system package manager.

You can install the repository and key manually with the following script

curl https://packages.expandrive.com/keys/expandrive.asc | gpg – dearmor > packages.expandrive.gpg
sudo install -o root -g root -m 644 packages.expandrive.gpg /usr/share/keyrings/
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/packages.expandrive.gpg] https://packages.expandrive.com/expandrive stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/expandrive.list'

Then you update the package cache and install ExpanDrive using:

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install expandrive

RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS based desktop distributions

Download our latest .rpm package (64-bit) and use yum to install ExpanDrive and the required dependencies.

sudo yum localinstall ./ExpanDrive-2023.4.1.x86_64.rpm

Installing the .rpm will also automatically configure the yum repository and code signing key to enable easy update using the system package manager.

You can install the yum repo manually using the following script:

sudo rpm – import https://packages.expandrive.com/keys/expandrive.asc
sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[expandrive]\nname=expandrive\nbaseurl=https://packages.expandrive.com/rpm\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=1\ngpgkey=https://packages.expandrive.com/keys/expandrive.asc" > /etc/yum.repos.d/expandrive.repo'

Then update your package cache and install Expandrive using dnf (Fedora 22 and above):

sudo dnf check-update
sudo dnf install expandrive

or using yum

yum check-update
sudo yum install expandrive

Server/Headless Edition

Head over to our ExpanDrive Server Edition page for instructions and packages for Windows and Linux servers. ExpanDrive Server edition is designed to run unattended, at boot [versus login], and provides drives that can even be re-shared on the network.

Remote storage mounted directly within the filesystem
ExpanDrive includes a powerful cloud storage browser

Amazing Reviews

allan-odgaard

“ExpanDrive lets you mount remote sftp drives and it actually works! I.e. no long delays or dropped connection in the middle of a save.”

Allan Odgaard, TextMate

DF-Star-Logo

“My first impression after reading ExpanDrive’s promotional description last week was that it sounded too good to be true. One week later, I’m pretty sure it actually is that good.”

John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Box Network Drive

ExpanDrive for Linux has a full featured file explorer as well as a fast network drive client. This builds support for Box into every application in your environment, including terminal apps and the file explorer.

Map or Mount Amazon Drive as a Network Drive on Mac or Windows

Unfortunately Amazon has disabled 3rd-party API access to Amazon Drive as of September 2019. Because of this ExpanDrive no longer supports Amazon Drive but please note that we still do support Amazon S3.

ExpanDrive v7.2

ExpanDrive has been updated to v7.2. This is a bug fix release that takes care of a number of small issues. It improves refresh performance of remote files as well as adds a native 64 bit binary for Windows. We are also now distributing a system-wide (multi user) MSI from our download page, suitable for bulk deployments.

You can grab it on the auto updater or over at our ExpanDrive 7 page.

ExpanDrive v7.0.17

ExpanDrive 7 has been updated to v7.0.17. This is a bug fix release that takes care of a number of small issues. Notably it fixes compatibility with some older Linux distributions that have outdated gcc libraries.

You can grab it on the auto updater or over at our ExpanDrive 7 page.

ExpanDrive 6.4.7

ExpanDrive v6.4.7 is out as a maintenance update for customers still on version 6, adding support for macOS 10.14.5 and newer. This build is only for Mac.

Map Box as a Network Drive on Mac, Windows and Linux

Box.com, like most big online storage providers, provides a Sync client for your desktop PC or Mac. The Box sync client has long been plagued with problems and has had a reputation of being notoriously slow and buggy. Especially on the Mac. Box Sync 4 improves things a bit, but it still has the same problems any syncing app has. The best solution is to Map or Mount Box as a Network Drive, with ExpanDrive. Connect to your Box account just like a USB Drive. Browse the account in any application, like Word, Powerpoint, Photoshop – whatever. View and managed all your files directly from within Finder on the Mac or Explorer.

Learn More
Download ExpanDrive
Version 2023.4.1 for Mac, Windows and Linux
April 10th, 2023

Box as a network drive

Problems with Sync – It needs lots of hard drive space

To use Box Sync you first have to download all the data to your machine – which takes a long time and can take a lot of storage.  If you’re running a MacBook Air or an notebook with a 128GB SSD it’s going to pretty hard to use your company’s 500GB Box account. Forget trying to store lots of media and assets with Box sync. What you really want is to offload that data to the cloud, but still be able to get at it when you need it. That’s what a network drive like ExpanDrive is perfect for. The files are still there, but they are just stored directly on Box.

Learn More
Download ExpanDrive
Version 2023.4.1 for Mac, Windows and Linux
April 10th, 2023

Sync is less Secure

Box has a great security model – you can provide fine grained control to your users. When employees leave, you can simply revoke their permissions. However, using Box Sync that model breaks down a bit. Everybody has a copy of the data sitting on their laptop. If the machine is lost or stolen the files remain there for the taking. If an employee runs off, they can still access all the data they had before since it is just sitting in a folder on their computer.

Connect Box as a Network Drive with ExpanDrive

ExpanDrive makes managing your Box account as seamless as using a USB Drive. It also improves the Box security model – ExpanDrive accesses everything on demand. Here is a video to help get a better idea of what ExpanDrive does and how it works.

Map Dropbox as a Network Drive on Mac, Windows or Linux

Dropbox is the most popular consumer online storage platform, now with over half a billion users in the system. Their primary client is the Dropbox desktop sync client, which mirrors a folder named Dropbox out to the cloud. It works great. However, as the amount of data you deal with in Dropbox or the number of users all accessing the same storage in Dropbox for Business starts to increase, sync gets pretty messy. Things like figuring out how to deal with different users that only have permission to a subset of the data or dealing with a 5TB dropbox account with users that only have a few hundred GB of storage on their Windows 7 laptops start to become real problems.

Map Dropbox as a Drive

ExpanDrive solves this by letting you actually mount Dropbox as a virtual drive on Mac and Windows. This lets you access your content natively, from Finder or Explorer, without having to sync the data. It’s all on demand, like a regular native filesystem. To get started, you want to download ExpanDrive.

Learn More
Download ExpanDrive
Version 2023.4.1 for Mac, Windows and Linux
April 10th, 2023

dropbox-screenshot1

Once you’ve downloaded and installed ExpanDrive, you’ll want to select the option to create a new Dropbox Drive.

ExpanDrive will now ask you to authorize a connection between ExpanDrive and Dropbox. This is a secure direct connection between your computer and Dropbox, ExpanDrive has no server that sits in between you.

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Once you’ve established the connection, you’ll have a virtual drive accessible from every application on your machine including Finder and Explorer.

System Requirements

ExpanDrive supports macOS 10.12 or newer and a wide variety of Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Centos, Fedora, Redhat, and more. Learn more about how to install ExpanDrive for Linux here.

ExpanDrive runs on Microsoft Windows 7 through Windows 10. Windows Server 2012+ is also supported as well as RDP/Terminal services environments. ExpanDrive can isolate multiple users logged into the same machine so they each have their own view of cloud storage.

ExpanDrive v7.0.12

ExpanDrive 7 has been updated to v7.0.12 – It fixes a number of issues with Azure Storage, B2 connectivity and improvements to OneDrive and Sharepoint connections. Additionally it adds support for command-line interaction.

Usage: expandrive [options]

Options:
  -V, – version            output the version number
  -m, – mount [name]       Mount Drive
  -e, – eject [name]       Eject Drive
  -d, – destroy [name]     Destroy bookmark
  -a, – activate [serial]  Activate ExpanDrive License
  -c, – create [url]       Create SFTP/FTP/S3/WebDAV connection
  -h, – help               output usage information

On Mac you want to call into the bundle to get to the command-line binary – ExpanDrive.app/Contents/MacOS/ExpanDrive. We will make an option to link a global shortcut to this soon.

You can grab it on the auto updater or over at our ExpanDrive 7 page.

ExpanDrive v7.0.10 beta

ExpanDrive 7 has been updated to v7.0.10 – It fixes a number of issues with OneDrive and Sharepoint logins as well as improvements to uploading files inside the file browser on Windows. You can grab it on the auto updater or over at our ExpanDrive 7 page.

ExpanDrive v7.0.9 beta

ExpanDrive updated to v7.0.9 – it adds improvements to the auto-updater mechanism, fixes an issue preventing full quit on Linux in certain scenarios, improves drag and drop uploading and improves the Wasabi connector. Many other small issues also have been resolved. Thanks to everyone participating, especially the Linux testers!