Dropbox then indexes them fine without using excessive memory or having to download them from the internet. Just in case this is of any use to anyone else, now I'm working around the problem by using Samba to copy the files across to the Linux machine manually and moving them to the correct place under the Dropbox folder. I think this is a fairly recent problem (like in the last few months) because I've LAN Synced very large files (~30GiB) to this system without issue before. sudo apt-get install nautilus-dropbox I found the command here: Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 14. It happens with at least Windows 10 as the source of the LAN Sync and I'm on version 3.12.5 on both machines. Install TeX Live 2016 on Ubuntu 16.04 dropbox on Ubuntu 16.04 vim and vundle on Ubuntu 16.04 python setup on Ubuntu 16.04 ES2015 using Node, Babel and Webpack Upgrading to Meteor 1.3 on Ubuntu 14.04 A d3 experiment on my Tinkerer blog Install Meteor on Ubuntu 14.04 Installing node LTS version on Ubuntu 14.

It doesn't use memory like that when syncing a file normally from the Dropbox servers.

I tried monitoring the memory usage (using 'watch -n 1 -d free') and the Dropbox status (using 'dropbox.py status') at the same time, and the memory usage seems to increase at the rate of the LAN Sync transfer, so it looks very much like when using LAN Sync Dropbox is trying to store the whole incoming file in memory at once. Do you have any large files (bigger than your RAM+swap) in your Dropbox by any chance Travis? I'm having this problem too when LAN syncing large files to my Linux machine (running Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS 64-bit).

Install dropbox on ubuntu 14.04