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Has anyone tried running multiple Dropbox accounts on one computer? What I would like is for every user to have their own Dropbox account/folder. On the Dropbox Help Center they write:

For our advanced users

Another option is to use a different Dropbox account for each user login on your computer. While this technically means you can have several Dropbox folders on the same computer, you will have to switch between each user account to take advantage of Dropbox's syncing features. This method is best for groups or families that have individual Dropbox accounts and use unique user logins on the same computer.

Has anyone tried this setup in Ubuntu? My question has two parts:

  1. Does it work in the simple case when only one user is logged in at a time?

  2. What happens if two users are logged in (I log in as user one, then switch to user two without logging out)? Does the synchronization go haywire?

2 Answers 2

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I went ahead and tried this out. The first installation was successful in the normal way; when I tried running Dropbox for the second user, I was prompted to download the proprietary daemon. It seemed strange to me that I would need to do this twice, but I did it and set up the second account successfully, too.

So far I haven't noticed any adverse effects, and I've had both users signed in simultaneously.

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Dropbox installs to your home directory. This is true across platforms - we use it on Mac, Windows, and Linux. In all cases, installing it for one user only sets it up for that specific user. If I need it in two accounts I have to install and configure it separately for both accounts. This makes sense from a security standpoint (it shares only your personal documents, not a single shared location that all users can access) and from a use-case standpoint (it's generally used for syncing data between computers, not for syncing between accounts on one system).

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