Dropbox Forums » Mobile Apps

1.  Jochen S.
   Pro User
   Posts: 419

   Hi,

   I don't have Dropbox on my iPhone yet, but maybe one of the blessed users or the Dropbox team could help me. I'd like to know how the filesystem structure for Dropbox looks like. Maybe it's possible to extend the availability of the cached data with some easy hacking and symlinking ;)

   If you've got a jailbroken phone and feel familiar with the command line/ssh access to your iPhone, I'd appreciate your help.

   First you need to find out where the iPhone application is located. Login as root on your iPhone, then execute the following:
   find /var/mobile/Applications -type d | grep Dropbox.app$

   This should print out something like this:
   /var/mobile/Applications/FF1A5F24-620A-4DEC-BF9F-5CE6EEA8B450/Dropbox.app

   The FF1A5F24-620A-4DEC-BF9F-5CE6EEA8B450 is a randomly generated and will be different on your iPhone.

   Next please do another find and use the path just found, leaving out the /Dropbox.app at the end:
   find /var/mobile/Applications/FF1A5F24-620A-4DEC-BF9F-5CE6EEA8B450

   This should print a list of files and directories. This is what I'd like to know, please post the result here in this thread. Feel free to make the personal parts anonymous. I'm not interested in your personal data, just how the structure looks like on the iPhone :)

   Thanks!

   Posted 2 years ago #

2.  Jochen S.
   Pro User
   Posts: 419

   Thanks to blackra1n I'm now on firmware 3.1.2 and can use the Dropbox app on my iPhone, too :)

   I fooled around a little with the idea mentioned in my first post, but unfortunately one iPhone app cannot access another app's private folder structure even if I add symlinks.

   What works though is creating a bunch of hard links. But hard links are not available for folders. Fortunately there's rsync and it's got a nice --link-dest option. Using this, I'm now able to manually sync my Dropbox cached files with GoodReader's "My Documents". It's a bit hacky though because GoodReader doesn't always notice that there are new files, it takes a couple of refreshes (quit/restart app).

   Here's the script for those that want to tinker with it. No warranty, don't try this unless you know what you're doing!
   

   #!/bin/bash
   GOODREADER=$( find /var/mobile/Applications -type d | grep GoodReader.app$ )
   DROPBOX=$( find /var/mobile/Applications -type d | grep Dropbox.app$ )
   
   echo "GoodReader is here: $GOODREADER"
   echo "Dropbox is here: $DROPBOX"
   
   rsync -av --delete \
     --link-dest="$DROPBOX/../Library/Caches/CachedFiles" \
     "$DROPBOX/../Library/Caches/CachedFiles/" \
     "$GOODREADER/../Documents/Dropbox/"

   Posted 2 years ago #

3. l h.
   Member
   Posts: 28

   See my post here: http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?id=13506&replies=1
   I found that with iFile or iEdit you can navigate to your cached "Favorites" and edit text files there. The issue is that the Dropbox.app doesn't UPLOAD changes to files. So if you change a text file using iFile, or make a new text file, nothing happens. And eventually your changes get overwritten by the old versions...

   Posted 2 years ago #

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