Maestral Alternatives

maestral reviews and mentions

• Nothing at all like the bloated app that Dropbox's Mac client has grown into
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jul 2026

  I used to recommend https://github.com/samschott/maestral but it appears to have been archived and no longer maintained :(

• Maestral, an open-source Dropbox client, is no longer maintained
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jul 2026
• Maestral: Open-source Dropbox client for macOS and Linux
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2024
• Dropbox telemetry can't be disabled
  1 project | /r/privacy | 27 Apr 2023

  maestral is an open source Mac/Linux client. Just one example, I’m sure there are others.

• New Dropbox client moves files from –/ to –/Library
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Feb 2023

  Worth mention the open source project Maestral: https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral

  (an unofficial Dropbox client)

• If you're archiving stuff to a cloud-synced folder, you NEED a strategy for ensuring ongoing integrity.
  2 projects | /r/DataHoarder | 7 Aug 2022

  Sometime late last fall, my NAS rebooted and my ZFS pools didn't come back online automatically, but Docker did automatically restart the Maestral client. In so doing, it detected an empty folder...and...promptly deleted EVERYTHING in my Dropbox, assuming I'd just deleted everything locally. It's an issue that has had at least a few bug reports and which as of yet still hasn't been addressed - basically, the client needs but does not have a way to say "a bunch of stuff is changing, are you sure?" before doing it - especially on a restart of the client.

• Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu
  24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Apr 2022

  >- Debug apps which don't opt into debugging, using gdb/lldb, without disabling SIP. It's my computer, I should be root, I should be able to introspect how processes execute on it. Not being able to do so prevented me from debugging https://github.com/samschott/maestral/issues/597, since I had to disable SIP, which required rebooting, which stopped the bug from happening.

  Another option is to re-sign the application with the entitlements necessary for debugging.

  e.g:

  https://gist.github.com/talaviram/1f21e141a137744c89e81b58f7...

• Dropbox Client or 3rd party client for Mac Mini M1?
  1 project | /r/mac | 30 Jan 2022

  there is a native build as beta, but I found Maestral much better :) https://github.com/samschott/maestral

• Dropbox Sync does not natively support Apple Silicon
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Oct 2021

  3) No support for extended file attributes (so you cannot sync .app bundles)

  [1] https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral/issues/443

• Nine Raspberry Pis power this entire office
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Oct 2021

  If you still haven't found a use for them: they make for good low-power, always-on, headless networked servers for processing-light tasks.

  Other commentators mentioned pihole/DNS, WireGuard, and music streaming, but you can also use them for a (slow) NFS server, persistent Syncthing node, Maestral host[1] (third-party Dropbox client written in Python (that can actually run on the Raspberry Pi, unlike the official Dropbox client)), or device that maintains a connection to a distributed network (e.g. Hyporborea/cjdns).

  [1] https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral

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