Need to persist dates for directories with Dropbox. How?

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What is the problem you are having with rclone?

Late to the party as I've been ootl but got warnings all over my G00gle now and realized it is time to move to Dropbox.
However, upon running rclone sync/copy I notice the folder dates are not persisted. All folders just get a default jan 1 2000 date on Dropbox. This is not good as it is important metadata for me to have for many reasons.

This was not the case with G00gle and date persistence was fine.

Run the command 'rclone version' and share the full output of the command.

rclone v1.63.0
- os/version: debian 11.7 (64 bit)
- os/kernel: 5.10.0-21-amd64 (x86_64)
- os/type: linux
- os/arch: amd64
- go/version: go1.20.5
- go/linking: static
- go/tags: none

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

Dropbox

The command you were trying to run (eg rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp)

rclone sync '/media/music' dropbox-music: --transfers 12 --checkers 12 --tpslimit 12 --dropbox-batch-mode async --fast-list --checksum --dropbox-batch-size 1000 --dropbox-batch-timeout 10s --bwlimit 50M:60M --progress --log-file /var/log/rclone/copy-dropbox-music-202307051509.log -vv

The rclone config contents with secrets removed.

general copy and sync  question for dropbox

A log from the command with the -vv flag

Paste  log here
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You can not - It is dropbox API limitation.

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In general rclone does not currently support any kind of metadata for folders, not even mod time.

With some remotes like gdrive you get actual folder creation date with dropbox it is fixed value.

Folders dates are never preserved with rclone.

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Ok, bad news. Thanks for replying.

Any way around this that is well known? A script perhaps to run that grabs the date for files and adds to parent folder would work. Sorry, unable to find good docs and info on it here but figured more users than me should have the same problem

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As it is explained in the linked github thread it can be possible for some remotes (not sure if for dropbox though) but is not implemented at the moment.

It would be possible to change this but it would be quite a lot of work re-plumbing things througout rclone. For the object based backends we'd store an object with a name ending in / (rclone already knows how to ignore these).

Is this important to your companyu @novitk ? Maybe they'd like to sponsor the development of the feature?

It would work - but first you have to talk to dropbox to convince them to allow to set date on folder via their API.

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Thanks for sharing information.

I've tested touch -t on a mount directory and it works so will see if there are any scripts or so that does it. Otherwise I'll try to create one although I'm not well versed in bash so will probably take some time hehe.

First I'll take of the dropbox - google migration. This is secondary, of course :slight_smile:

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I do not think it works... as when you unmount and mount again all these changes will be gone. It is only local cache you see.

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Oh no. Well ok, thanks again

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Hello,

I have the same problem, Google > Dropbox or Personal server > Dropbox :

Files are ok but folders wrong date "Jan 1 2000"

I asked some friends and they don't have the same problem so I don't undserstand... I try with their config and this don't fix it...

Any idea ? Because it's working for some people ^^

Thx

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Then please use their solution. folders created by rclone will always have date "Jan 1 2000"

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But I when I do the same as their config, I still have "Jan 1 2000" ^^

That's why I don't understand (and I never had this issue on Gdrive)

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because this is how rclone works:) this is dropbox API limitation - not possible to set/read folder creation time (it is on google). In addition rclone does not support folder modification time on any remote.

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thx for answer !

I'll ask to my friend to check again because he told me he got good date with rclone copy to dropbox :slight_smile:

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What is possible that he uses mount:) and will have correct dates... until restart.

If you mount dropbox with rclone mount all folders will have the date and time from the execution of the mount command.

Newly created folders will have new dates after the execution of the command.

After a restart all folders will have the date and time from the mount command again.

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Ohh you're right ! I just tried it and I saw after restart mount my created folder in mount with the good date switch to "Jan 1 2000" ^^

I didn't try it so I though I was missing something !

Thx again

1 Like
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My friend just confirm all is ok for him ^^ He can also restart mount and he still have the good date.

I'm on ubuntu and he is using unraid, the only diff between us

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your friend is wrong and most likely mixing something - like he is looking at folders on local not on remote.

rclone can not set folder date in dropbox.

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He shows me on remote with ssh from unraid, with "rclone lsd" and in Filezilla. All the time he got date ^^

Crazy

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