CHANGELOG.md

v1.9.3:

Changed:

• Disable sync issues menu item if there are no sync issues.

Fixed:

• Fixed maestral excluded add | remove commands failing with an incorrect argument name.
• Fixed a segfault in the macOS GUI triggerd by various actions in the selective sync dialog.

v1.9.2:

Changed:

• Preserve extended attributes of local files when syncing remote changes.
• The macOS app bundle is now built with Python 3.12. This supports detecting and using SOCKS proxies configured in macOS Settings.

Fixed:

• Fixes a regression introduced in v1.9.0 with opening windows from the menu bar on macOS 13 and earlier.

v1.9.1:

Fixed:

• Fixes a regression in v1.9.0 in the macOS GUI which prevented several buttons and menu items from reacting to clicks. This was a side effect from a new GUI framework API.

v1.9.0:

Changed:

• Allow passing multiple paths to maestral excluded add | remove CLI commands.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue where syncing remote changes would lead to the modified time of a file being set to the download time instead of the time of original modification.

v1.8.0

Changed:

• Dropped support for Python 3.7 which was reached end-of-life on 27 Jun 2023.

Fixed:

• Fixes the default systemd service name when enabling autostart on Linux. This was a regression in v1.7.3. Autostart entries created with maestral autostart -Y prior to v1.7.3 will continue to work.
• Fixes an issue where data transport errors that are retried could result in zero byte files being created in the cloud if the local file size is smaller than 4 MB.
• Fixes an issue where renaming a local file by making unicode normalisation changes only could lead to a cycle of deletion and re-creation on Dropbox servers when syncing with Maestral from multiple machines.

v1.7.3

This is the last release that supports Python 3.7 which will reach end-of-life on 27 Jun 2023. The macOS app always ships with its own Python runtime, but custom installations will require at least Python 3.8 starting with the next release.

Changed:

• Preparation for upcoming API changes in watchdog dependency.
• No more automatic reindexing: Maestral would automatically rebuild its index every 14 days. This could occasionally lead to conflicting copies if a file was modified remotely during this process. This reindexing is not necessary, especially as syncing has become very reliable. Starting with this release, reindexing needs to be triggered manually through the GUI or CLI if required.

Fixed:

• Fixes autostart entries for the GUI being malformed when Maestral is installed in a Python virtual environment.
• Fixes autostart entries for the daemon being malformed for the macOS app bundle. This applies to autostart entries created with maestral autostart -Y and not using the "Start on login" checkbox in the GUI.
• The filestatus now is case-sensitive when checking on a case-sensitive file system.
• Fixes an issue where renaming a file by changing the casing only would not be picked up if Maestral was not running during the rename.

v1.7.2

Changed:

• Improved support for systems where some file system calls don't accept a follow_symlinks = False option, notably chmod and utime.
• Abort uploads if the file is modified between the upload of individual chunks. This saves some bandwidth and prevents us from ever committing an inconsistent file to Dropbox's version history.
• Show desktop notifications when a conflicting copy is created both during upload and download sync. Unlike regular notifications, those notifications are shown for each conflicting copy instead of giving a summary count.
• Append the username and date to the file name of a conflicting copy, for example myfile (Sam's conflicting copy 2022-08-30).pdf.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue for systems that do not provide /sys/class/power_supply such as Synology devices. Power supply state is periodically queried to prevent automatic reindexing when on battery power.
• Fixes potentially inconsistent error messages if Maestral does not have permissions to perform file moves within the local Dropbox folder.
• Fixes a regression with some icon buttons in the macOS GUI not being displayed.

v1.7.1

Fixed:

• Fixes running the app bundle version on Intel Macs.

v1.7.0

Changed:

• Allow limiting the upload and download bandwidth used for syncing, either by setting the config file values, by using the CLI maestral bandwidth-limit up|down, or through the Settings pane in the GUI.
• Add config file items for the maximum number of parallel file transfers.
• Speed up querying the sync status of folders.
• Added support for Python 3.12.

Fixed:

• Fixes the download sync of remote symlinks. The local item now is an actual symlink instead of a 0 KB file.
• Fixes an issue where the Login Items entry for Maestral would incorrectly be listed with the developer name instead of the app name in macOS Ventura's System Settings.
• Fixes an issue which would prevent periodic reindexing.
• Fixes an issue with interrupted downloads of folders which are newly included by selective sync not automatically resuming when Maestral restarts.
• Fixes an issue with detect the init system on some Linux distributions, a prerequisite for the autostart functionality.

Removed:

• Removed support for access token authentication. Users who linked Maestral to their Dropbox account before September 2020 will be asked to reauthenticate so that Maestral can retrieve a refresh token instead.

v1.6.5

Fixed:

• Fixes starting the gui with maestral gui from Python 3.9 and lower. This does not affect the macOS app bundle.

v1.6.4

Changed:

• Drops support for macOS 10.13 and 10.14. macOS 10.15 or later is now required, reflecting the support status from Apple. In the future, we will drop support for macOS versions once they no longer receive security updates.
• Improved status messages: the sync count is now updated as items are uploaded or downloaded instead of with a delay.
• maestral activity now shows animating progress bars to view upload and download progress.
• maestral sharelink list now outputs plain urls, separated by new lines. Use the --long | -l option if you would like a pretty-printed table with additional information about each link.
• maestral history now shows where the listed changes occurred (local vs remote).
• When multiple GUIs are installed (for example Qt and Cocoa), ask the user to choose when running maestral gui instead of selecting a default.

Fixed:

• Fixes an error which would prevent running Maestral on Python 3.7.
• Fixes a regression where the CLI command maestral activity would fail when run from a macOS app bundle.
• Fixes an issue where reauthorizing Maestral's Dropbox access could hang indefinitely.
• Fixes an issue on macOS where changing the casing of two local file names in the same folder in quick succession could result in the second file being deleted during sync.

Dependencies:

• Introduced rich dependency.
• Removed sdnotify dependency.

v1.6.3

Changed:

• The macOS app bundle now uses Python 3.10 instead of 3.9. This comes with some performance improvements.

Fixed:

• Work around transitory server-side errors when refreshing access tokens by retrying the refresh up to three times.
• Fixed a segfault on startup for a small number of macOS users.
• Fixed an issue where files which contain decomposed unicode characters could be deleted after renaming them locally on some versions of macOS.
• Fixes an issue where the maestral gui command would fail for macOS app bundles.

v1.6.2

Changed:

• Improved error message for file names with incompatible characters that are rejected by Dropbox servers, e.g., emoji or slashes at the end of a file name.
• Capture Dropbox SDK logs in Maestral's log output. This will log which API endpoints are called and any retries on errors or rate limiting.

Fixed:

• Fixes intermittent failures to show a file associated with a sync issue in the Linux GUI.
• Fixes an issue where the macOS app bundle would use a system-wide installation of the Sparkle framework if available instead of the one bundled with Maestral. This could lead to unexpected issues if the system-wide installation would have an incompatible version.
• Fixes an issue where the access level of shared links may be incorrectly reported.
• Resume interrupted downloads after a shutdown when including new items with selective sync.
• Fixes occasional conflicting copies of folders during initial sync due to a race condition when a child item is synced before its parent folder.
• Fixes the display of timestamps in the CLI from maestral ls and maestral history commands. The former would show times in UTC instead of the device's timezone and the latter would show Unix timestamps instead of formatted output.

v1.6.1

Fixed:

• Fixes an error when querying space usage from Dropbox servers for team accounts.
• Fixes reading from the database on SQLite versions pre 3.23.0 (2018-04-02), for example on macOS High Sierra.

v1.6.0

Changed:

• Sync errors are now stored in a SQlite database table instead of a config file.
• The CLI command maestral filestatus PATH will now return error if there is a sync error for any child of the given path. This brings it in line with the syncing status.
• Re-enabled updating from versions older than 1.5.0.
• Improved file integrity checks after upload or download.
• Better parallelize CPU intensive work when indexing local changes. This improves performance on multicore CPUs.
• Migrate the Linux GUI from PyQt5 to PyQt6.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue where upload sync errors could continue to be reported after the local file was deleted if the deletion occurred while sync was not running.
• Fixes an issue with the Linux Qt GUI where aborting the setup dialog after linking but before choosing a local Dropbox folder would result in an inconsistent state.
• Fixes an issue when storing 64-bit inode numbers in our database.
• Fixes occasional crashes of the macOS GUI when running on Apple Silicon.

v1.5.3

Changed:

• The Dock icon no longer appears while the app is launching in macOS.
• The Dock icon no longer appears when clicking on a desktop notification on macOS.
• Clicking on a desktop notification will now show the file or folder which triggered the notification. Previously, only clicking on the "Show" button of the notification would open the file browser.
• Removed update notifications by the CLI.
• Proper symlink handling: Remote items which are symlinks will now be synced as symlinks instead of empty files. Local symlinks will no longer be followed during indexing or silently ignored when syncing. Instead, attempting to upload a symlink will raise an error because uploading symlinks is not currently supported by the public Dropbox API.

Fixed:

• Fixes a crash of the maestral activity CLI command when run from the macOS App Bundle due to a missing packaged library.
• Fixes an issue which prevented the maestral gui command from working with the macOS app bundle.
• Fixes an issue where moving a local file to overwrite another file, for example with mv in the terminal, could generate an incorrect conflicting copy during upload sync.
• Properly handle when the local Dropbox directory is renamed by changing the casing only on case-insensitive file systems such as APFS on macOS.
• Fixes an issue which could result in sync errors not being cleared after the successful sync of an item under some circumstances.
• Relative paths passed to maestral move-dir are now interpreted relative to the working directory where the command is run instead of the working directory of the sync daemon.

v1.5.2

Changed:

• Improved dialog flow on Linux when the local Dropbox folder is missing.
• Improved error handling when determining the change time (ctime) of a local file fails.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue where the output of CLI commands would get truncated to 80 characters when piped to another command and not attached to an interactive stream such as a terminal.
• Fixes Python 3.10 compatibility of Linux (Qt) GUI, thanks to @raffaem.
• Fixes an issue where the CLI fails to install on Apple Silicon Macs.
• Fixes a startup loop of the Linux GUI when the local Dropbox folder is missing.

v1.5.1

Changed:

• Handle Dropbox server errors in the same way as connection errors by retrying the sync job.

Fixed:

• Fixed issues when trying to abort the CLI setup dialog with ctrl+C.
• Fixes an issue which could under some circumstances result in deleted folder content after performing the initial indexing and download. This would mostly occur for shared folders.
• Fixes an issue where launchd or systemd might start the sync daemon with a non-UTF-8 encoding set in the environment.
• Fixes an issue where deleting the local Dropbox folder during startup indexing may result in some files being deleted from the remote Dropbox.

v1.5.0

Added:

• Added support for Dropbox Business accounts with a Team Space. Shared folders in a Team Space will now be synced at the top level, next to the user's personal folder.

Changed:

• Reorganised config file sections.
• Brought back support for macOS High Sierra in the macOS app bundle.

Fixed:

• Fixed a crash when running the CLI command maestral config-file --clean.

v1.4.8

Added:

• Added automatic updates with Sparkle for the macOS app bundle.

Changed:

• Improved performance when processing local file events.
• Improved error messages when the system keyring cannot be accessed despite being unlocked, for example because the executable (app bundle or Python) has an invalid signature.
• Improved error messages on startup for the macOS app bundle.
• Improved error message in the CLI when setting a config value fails because the new value has the wrong type.
• Improved handling of more exotic file system or device related errors when opening local files.

Fixed:

• Fixed a crash on startup of the daemon when the log level is set to WARNING.
• Fixed an issue which could result in an unresponsive daemon during startup on macOS.
• Fixed an issue which could result in the CLI or GUI to stall indefinitely if the daemon process is unresponsive.
• Fixed an issue in the macOS GUI where passing the "missing Dropbox folder" flow by selecting a new location would lead to duplicate menu entries in the status bar menu.
• Fixed an issue where the Linux / Qt GUI would hang indefinitely after unlinking.
• Fixed an issue where moving / removing the local Dropbox folder during a download could lead to unhandled exceptions instead of useful error messages.
• Fixed handling of 503 and other raw HTTP errors from the Dropbox SDK, for instance when Dropbox servers have temporary outages or are undergoing planned maintenance.
• Fixed periodic connection checking for connections over proxy using http_proxy environment variable.
• Fixed an issue where some uploaded items would not register as synced after aborting or pausing during an upload sync.
• Fixed a compatibility issue with watchdog v2.1.4 and higher.

Removed:

• Removed an unneeded prompt when revoking a shared link.

v1.4.6

Changed:

• Performance improvements to selective sync dialog in GUI.

Fixed:

• Fixed an IndexError during conflict resolution when the local item is a non-empty folder.

v1.4.5

Added:

• Support CMD+Q keyboard shortcut to quit app on macOS.

Changed:

• Clarified the "merge local folder" option in the GUI's setup dialog.

Fixed:

• Fixed an issue where erroneous file conflicts could occur when a file name contains decomposed unicode characters such as "é" represented by "e" + "́" instead of a single character.
• Fixed an issue where center-aligned text would appear right-aligned on Apple Silicon computers.

Dependencies:

• Bumped desktop-notifier to v3.3.0. This fixes a segfault for non-framework distributions of Python such as Anaconda Python.

v1.4.4

This release introduces support for tab-completion in the shell, allows you to choose the actual Dropbox folder instead of its parent folder / location from the GUI, and further reduces memory usage during startup indexing. As usual, several bugs have been squashed.

The website has also moved to its own domain at maestral.app. The source still lives in the website branch of the GitHub repo and contributions are welcome.

Added:

• Added support for shell completion. Completion is available for the commands themselves and for several arguments, notably paths relative to the Dropbox folder and choices from a set of fixed options. Use the command maestral completion to generate shell completion scripts for bash, zsh or fish. For bash or zsh, save the returned script in a location of you choice and source it in '~/.bashrc' or '~/.zshrc', respectively. For fish, save the returned script at '~/.config/fish/completions/maestral.fish'. Completion is available for the base commands themselves and several arguments, notably paths relative to the Dropbox folder and choices from a set of fixed options.

Changed:

• Improved error messages when inotify limits are reached on Linux.
• GUI dialogs to select a local Dropbox folder now ask for the actual folder name instead of the location only.
• Local indexing on startup is now carried out without loading the entire folder tree into memory. This further reduces peak memory usage and fragmentation.
• Permission errors when scanning the contents of a local folder during startup indexing are now treated as fatal errors instead of skipping its content. This prevents items from being deleted on the server when they are still present locally but inaccessible.
• Improved logging during daemon startup: Logging is now initialised immediately after the main imports and therefore captures potential errors early during the startup process.
• Loggers are scoped per configuration instead of globally. This enables separating logs for Maestral instances for different configs which are running in the same process.
• Improved performance and appearance of the selective sync dialog. Folder content is no longer pre-fetched but will be loaded on-demand when expanding a folder.

Fixed:

• Fixes a rare issue where throttling of sync threads would be disabled if the "max_cpu_percent" config value would be set to 100% divided by the number of CPU cores (e.g, 25% on a 4-core CPU).
• Fixes an issue where a local permission error would be treated as a fatal error instead of as a sync issue.
• Moving the Dropbox folder between partitions no longer triggers a full resync.
• Fixes an error when running the diff CLI command and selecting the local file as the base version.
• Fixes download links in the update dialog.
• Fixes an unexpected error which may occur when creating a conflicting copy.

Dependencies:

• Bumped click to >= v8.0.0 to support shell completion.
• Bumped survey to >= v3.4.3 for Python 3.6 support.

v1.4.3

This release improves performance and memory usage by switching from sqlalchamey to our own database interaction layer.

Maestral now also has a website with a detailed documentation of the command line interface, released with github pages at https://samschott.github.io/maestral.

Changed:

• We now use our own ORM layer instead of sqlalchemy. This improves both baseline memory usage and peak memory usage during startup and indexing.
• Use a new network session for each thread and clean up network resources before the thread stops.
• The macOS GUI will now show a dock icon if there is an open window.
• The CLI will print full tracebacks to the console in case of unexpected errors.

Fixed:

• Fixed detecting local changes when saving an MS Office on macOS with recent versions of the Office suite.

Dependencies:

• Bumped desktop-notifier to >=3.2.2
• Bumped watchdog to >=2.0.1
• Removed sqlalchemy
• Removed alembic

v1.4.2

Fixes an issue where the daemon might restart syncing even though it should be paused when an internet connection is reestablished.

v1.4.1

Fixes an issue where the daemon status may incorrectly report "Connecting..." even though the daemon is connected.

v1.4.0

This release brings significant extensions to the command line interface: It introduces commands to create and manage shared links, to compare older version of a file and print the diff output to the terminal, and commands for direct access to config values (note the warning below). It also adds optional one-way syncing, for instance to keep a mirror of a remote Dropbox folder while ignoring local changes.

Several bugs have been fixed which could occur when resuming the sync activity after the connection had been lost while indexing a remote folder.

Finally, this release removes automatic error reporting via Bugsnag. Please file any bug reports as issues on GitHub where it is possible to follow up.

Added:

• Added a command maestral diff to compare different versions of a text file. The resulting diff is printed to the console. Credit goes to @OrangeFran.

• Resurrected the command maestral revs to list previous versions (revisions) of a file.

• Added a command group maestral sharelink to create and manage shared links. Subcommands are:

  • create: Create a shared link for a file or folder, optionally with password protection and an expiry date on supported accounts (business and professional).
  • list: List shared links, either for a specific file or folder or for all items in your Dropbox.
  • revoke: Revoke a shared link.

• Added a command group maestral config to provide direct access to config values. Subcommands are:

  • get: Gets the config value for a key.
  • set: Sets the config value for a key.

  This provides access to previously inaccessible config values such as reindex_interval or max_cpu_percent. Please refer to a Wiki for an overview of all config values. Use the set command with caution: setting some config values may leave the daemon in an inconsistent state (e.g., changing the location of the Dropbox folder). Always use the equivalent command from the Settings group (e.g., maestral move-dir).

• Added the ability to disable a single sync direction, for instance to enable download syncs only. This can be useful when you want to mirror a remote folder while ignoring local changes or when syncing to a file system which does not support inotify. To use this, set the respective config values for upload or download to False. Note that conflict resolution remains unaffected. For instance, when an unsynced local change would be overwritten by a remote change, the local file will be moved to a "conflicting copy" first. However, the conflicting copy will not be uploaded.

Changed:

• Changes to indexing:

  • Avoid scanning of objects matching an .mignore pattern (file watches will still be added however). This results in performance improvements during startup and resume. A resulting behavioral change is that maestral will remove files matching an ignore pattern from Dropbox. After this change it will be immaterial if an .mignore pattern is added before or after having matching files in Dropbox. Credit goes to @andrewsali.
  • If Maestral is quit or interrupted during indexing, for instance due to connection problems, it will later resume from the same position instead of restarting from the beginning.
  • Indexing will no longer skip excluded folders. This is necessary for the above change.
  • Defer periodic reindexing, typically carried out weekly, if the device is not connected to an AC power supply. This prevents draining the battery when hashing file contents.

• Changes to CLI:

  • Moved linking and unlinking to a new command group maestral auth with subcommands link, unlink and status.
  • Renamed the command file-status to filestatus.
  • Added a --yes, -Y flag to the unlink to command to skip the confirmation prompt.
  • Renamed the configs command to list config files to config-files.
  • Added an option --clean to config-files to remove all stale config files (those without a linked Dropbox account).

• Improved the error message when the user is running out of inotify watches: Recommend default values of max_user_watches = 524288 and max_user_instances = 1024 or double the current values, whichever is higher. Advise to apply the changes with sysctl -p.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue with the CLI on Python 3.6 where commands that print dates to the console would raise an exception.
• Properly handle a rare OSError "[Errno 41] Protocol wrong type for socket" on macOS, see https://bugs.python.org/issue33450.
• Allow creating local files even if we cannot set their permissions, for instances on some mounted NTFS drives.
• Fixes an issue with the selective sync dialog in the Qt / Linux GUI where the "Update" button could be incorrectly enabled or disabled.
• Fixes an issue where a lost internet connection while starting the sync could lead to a stuck sync thread or an endless indexing cycle.
• Fixes an issue where a lost internet connection during the download of a folder newly included in selective sync could result in the download never being completed.
• Fixes an issue where pausing the sync during the download of a folder newly included in selective sync could result in the download never being completed.

Removed:

• Removed automatic error reporting via bugsnag.

• Removed from CLI:

  • The maestral restart command. Use stop and start instead.
  • The maestral account-info command. Use maestral auth status instead.

• Removed the public API methods Maestral.resume_sync and Maestral.pause_sync. Use Maestral.start_sync and Maestral.stop_sync instead.

Dependencies:

• Bumped survey to version >=3.2.2,<4.0.
• Bumped keyring to version >=22.
• Bumped watchdog to version >= 2.0.
• Added desktop-notifier dependency. This is spin-off project from Maestral, built on the code previously in the notify module.
• Removed the bugsnag dependency.

v1.3.1

Fixed:

• Fixes an incorrect entry point for the Qt GUI.

v1.3.0

This release features an overhaul of the command line interface: commands are grouped by sections in the help output, dialogs and output formatting have been improved and many commands have become significantly faster.

This release also significantly reduces the CPU usage when idle and provides a whole series of bug fixes for GUI and daemon.

Added:

• Desktop notifications for sync errors are now clickable and will show the related file or folder either on Dropbox or locally.
• Desktop notifications now have a "Show" button to show a recently changed file.
• Added a public API Maetral.status_change_longpoll for frontends to wait for status changes without frequent polling. status_change_longpoll blocks until there is a change in status and then returns True. The default timeout is 60 sec.

Changed:

• Significant improvements to the command line interface:
  • Overhauled all CLI dialogs with nicer formatting and more interactive prompts using the survey package.
  • Improved output of many CLI commands, including ls, activity, and restore.
  • Increased speed of many CLI commands by importing only necessary modules.
  • Shortened help texts for CLI commands.
  • Group help output by function.
• Reduced the CPU usage of daemon and GUIs in the idle state:
  • Increased timeouts for all event queues.
  • Decreased the frequency of daemon housekeeping tasks.
  • GUIs now use longpoll APIs to wait for state changes instead of frequent polling.
• Improved performance when syncing a large number of remote deletions.
• The Maestral.include_item() API now accepts paths which lie inside an excluded folder. When called with such a path, all immediate parents will be included as well. This change also applies to the maestral excluded remove.
• The Maestral.excluded_items property is no longer read-only.
• Some refactoring of the cli module to prepare for shell completion support.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue where all newly downloaded files would be created with 755 permissions. They are now created with the user's default permissions for new files instead.
• Fixes an unexpected crash when the list of pending_downloads or download_errors would contain an invalid path, i.e., a Dropbox path for which we cannot get any current or deleted metadata.
• Fixes an error when a local file name contains bytes which cannot be decoded by reported file system encoding. This now raises a sync error instead of crashing and all log handlers have been updated to deal with the resulting surrogate escapes.
• Fixes possible loss of data when excluding an item from syncing while it is downloaded. This is no longer possible and will raise a BusyError instead.
• Fixes an issue where maestral ls would fail when run with the -l, --long flag.
• Fixes an occasional IndexError during a download sync when trying to query past versions of a deleted item.
• Fixes an issue which could cause a segfault of the selective sync dialog on macOS.
• Fixes an issue where the selective sync dialog on Linux would not load the contents of more than 10 folders.
• Fixes a regression with the autostart functionality of the Linux GUI. Autostart entries created with v1.2.2 will need be reset by toggling the checkbox "start on login" off and on.
• Fixes an issue where two configs linked to the same Dropbox account would both be unlinked when trying to unlink only one of them.
• Fixes an import error with v11.0 of the Dropbox SDK.

Removed:

• Removed the maestral rev command to list old file revisions. Instead maestral restore will list possible revisions to restore.

Deprecated:

• Deprecated the Maestral.set_excluded_items API. Use the setter for Maestral.excluded_items instead.

Development:

• Updated tests and migrated fully to pytest.
• Improved API documentation, including sections on the sync logic and on logging.
• Added contributing guidelines.

Dependencies:

• Require watchdog<=10.3 because of an unresolved issue in watchdog 0.10.4 on macOS.
• Pin dropbox<12.0 to avoid bad surprises in case of breaking changes.
• Add survey>=2.1.0 for an interactive CLI.

v1.2.2

This release focuses on bug fixes and performance improvements. In particular, memory usage has been improved when syncing a Dropbox folder with a large number of items.

Changed:

• maestral file-status now accepts relative paths.
• Runs the daemon in a Python interpreter with -OO flags. This strips docstrings and saves a few MB of memory.
• Moves from pkg_resources to locate entry points and other metadata to the faster and more light-weight importlib.metadata.
• Update scripts are no longer run after a fresh install or for a new config.
• Significantly reduces memory usage during the initial sync of a Dropbox folder with many (> 10,000) items and when downloading a large set of changes. To achieve this, new APIs have been added to SyncEngine and DropboxClient that return iterators over remote changes. Dropbox servers are queried on every iteration.
• Maestral.get_history now returns only the last 100 sync events by default. This can be increased by setting the limit argument manually.
• The total sync history kept in out database is limited to the last 1,000 events.
• Switch from PyInstaller to briefcase for packaging on macOS.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue which would prevent the daemon from starting on macOS when running with Python 3.6.
• Fixes a segfault of the macOS GUI on macOS High Sierra.
• Fixes an issue with the macOS GUI becoming unresponsive when opening the selective sync dialog if one of the displayed folders contains a large number (> 2k) of immediate children.
• Fixes an issue with the Qt GUI crashing when opening the selective sync dialog if one of the folders contains a large number (> 2k) of immediate children.
• Fixes an issue where Mastral.excluded_status would return "included" for items inside an excluded folder.

v1.2.1

This update provides bug fixes and some improvements to error handling. Major changes don't regard Maestral itself but its distribution: a Docker image is now available, thanks to @aries1980, and the macOS app bundle has been rebuilt with the macOS 11 SDK, providing full compatibility from macOS 10.13 High Sierra to macOS 11.0 Big Sur.

Added:

• Added a Docker image, thanks to @aries1980. The docker image is based on Linux and does not currently include a GUI.
• Added -V, --version option to the command line interface to show the version and exit.

Changed:

• Improves handling of database related errors such as database integrity, missing read / write permissions for the database file, etc.
• Improves handling of errors when the keyring cannot be unlocked to delete credentials during an unlink.
• Improves handling of errors when the keyring where Dropbox credentials are stored becomes unavailable, e.g., has been uninstalled.
• Never start a subprocess when maestral is run with the -f, --foreground option. Previously, any required setup such as linking, etc, would still be performed in a subprocess.
• Minor tweaks and improvements to the macOS GUI.
• Allow sending desktop notifications in Linux before the daemon's event loop has started. This is useful for error messages which occur early during the initialization.
• Improves log messages when the connection to Dropbox is lost.
• Performance improvements to maestral activity in case of very large sync queues.

Fixed:

• Fixes a database integrity error due to an unfulfilled unique constraint.
• Fixes an issue when the daemon is launched with systemd where systemd would unexpectedly receive notifications from a subprocess instead of the main process.
• Fixes an issue which would prevent syncing from automatically resuming after moving the local Dropbox directory with maestral move-dir or through the GUI.
• Fixed a green background for sync issue views in the macOS GUI.
• Fixes an issue where the system tray icon in KDE Plasma could fall back to the regular app icon or not show up at all,
• Fixes an issue where the user may be asked to unlock or grant access to the system keyring twice on startup if access denied the first time.

Dependencies:

• Adds alembic dependency for database migrations.

v1.2.0

The local file index and sync history are now stored in a SQLite database. After the update, Maestral will first reindex your Dropbox to populate the new index.

This change enables several improvements to the command line interface and GUI: The command maestral activity now shows the progress of individual uploads or downloads. maestral history has been added to list recent sync events. In the GUI, the recent changes menu now has been replaced by a "Activity" window which shows all sync events of the past week.

This release also introduces clickable desktop notifications, performance improvements to indexing of local file changes, and bug fixes and smaller changes listed below.

Finally, this release introduces support for macOS 11 (Big Sur).

Added:

• Added an option -e, --external to maestral log show to open the log in the platform's default program instead of showing it in the console.
• Added a CLI command history to show all sync events of the past week.
• Added a "Activity" window to show all sync events of the past week.
• Desktop notifications are now clickable: for a single file change, clicking the notification will show the file in the platform's file manager. For a deletion, the Dropbox website is opened to provide options for restoring the file or folder.
• Use entry points to discover GUI frontends. 3rd party GUIs can register a maestral_gui entry point to be launched with the maestral gui CLI command. If installed, maestral gui will default to the 1st party maestral-cocoa or maestral- qt GUIs on macOS and Linux, respectively.

Changed:

• Transition to short-lived auth tokens for newly linked accounts.
• Transition to OAuth scopes for app permissions.
• Save all sync history and local index in SQLite database.
• Reduce unnecessary path conversions during indexing of local changes.
• Improved performance on case-sensitive file systems.
• Sync remote changes in filename even if they are only a change in casing. Those changes where previously ignored.
• Attempt to preserve local file permissions when syncing unless the file id has changed. Dropbox servers do store file permissions but don't make them available through the public API. We therefore cannot sync file permissions and instead choose not to overwrite locally set permissions on every download.
• Changed return type of Maestral.get_activity from namedtuple to dict for better consistency throughout the API. Every uploading or downloading item will have 'size' and 'completed' entries to monitor the progress of syncing individual items.
• The CLI command maestral activity now shows the progress of uploads and downloads for individual files.
• Introduced type annotations throughout and fixed a few type-related bugs.
• Added a field "Sync threads" to the output of the CLI command maestral status.
• The output of maestral ls is now printed in a grid, similar to the ls command included with most platforms.
• The macOS app bundle now uses Python 3.8, leading to some performance improvements when moving or copying file system trees.
• Prepared the GUI for changes in macOS Big Sur: use native alerts and dialogs wherever possible and refactor loading of libraries.
• Use an asyncio event loop instead of Pyro's event loop to run the daemon. This enables integration with the Cocoa run loop and callbacks when clicking notifications.

Fixed:

• Fixes a bug where throttling of sync threads would raise an error when we cannot determine the CPU count.
• Fixes a bug where sending SIGTERM to the daemon process would raise an error when we cannot determine its PID. Now, Stop.Failed is returned instead.
• Fixes a bug which would result in incorrect systemd unit files for non-default config file names. Please disable and re-enable autostart with maestral autostart -Y|-N to replace old unit files.
• Fixes a possible race condition when creating the cache directory.
• Fixes error handling when a file is changed while uploading.

Removed:

• Support for config names with spaces. Spaces could cause issues with autostart entries on some platforms.
• The ability to run the daemon in a separate thread. The daemon must now always be run in its own process.

Dependencies:

• Replaced jeepney dependency on Linux with dbus-next.

v1.1.0

This release expands the CLI functionality and improves the handling of file modification times during upload and download (used for display purposes only). It also fixes bugs with the "start on login" functionality of the macOS app bundle. After updating, please toggle "start on login" in the GUI or maestral autostart in the CLI to replace any old login items.

Added:

• Added --include-deleted option to maestral ls.
• Added -l, --long option to maestral ls to include metadata in listing.
• Added maestral revs command to list revisions of a file.
• Added maestral restore command to restore an old revision of a file.

Changed:

• Always create config directory if it does not exist.
• Improved performance of converting Dropbox paths to correctly cased local paths.
• Renamed macOS executable inside app bundle from "main" to "Maestral". This results in more informative process names.
• Local files are now created with the "last modified" time provided by Dropbox servers. This only applies to new downloads. To update existing modified times, you will need to delete and redownload your Dropbox folder.

Fixed:

• Fixes a thread-safety issue with desktop notifications.
• Fixes a thread-safety issue when two frontends try to start or stop syncing at the same time.
• Fixes an issue where Maestral could incorrectly identify a file system as case sensitive if the Dropbox folder and temporary directory are on partitions with different file systems.
• Fixes incorrect file modification times uploaded to Dropbox for timezones outside of UTC. Those times are used for display purposes only.
• Fixes an issue where the maestral autostart -Y CLI command would start the GUI on on login in case of the macOS app bundle.

v1.0.3

Changed:

• Both "-h" and "--help" can now be used to print help output for a command.
• Show both the daemon and GUI version in the settings window.
• The command line tool bundled with the macOS app now provides proper help output.
• Significantly reduced CPU usage of the GUI on macOS.
• The macOS app now uses a hardened runtime and is properly signed and notarized.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue which could lead to the local Dropbox folder being moved before syncing has been paused.
• Fixes an issue where download errors would show a rev number instead of the Dropbox path.
• Fixes a race condition when two processes try to start a sync daemon at the same time.
• Fixes an issue in the macOS GUI where updating the displayed sync issues could fail.
• Fixes truncated text in the macOS setup dialog.
• Fixes an issue on fresh macOS installs where creating autostart entries could fail if /Library/LaunchAgents does not yet exist.
• Fixes an issue in the macOS app bundle where installing the command line could tool would fail if /usr/local/bin is owned by root (as is default on a fresh install). Now, the user is asked for permission instead.

Dependencies:

• Removed lockfile dependency.
• Added fasteners dependency.

v1.0.2

This release fixes bugs in the command line interface.

Fixed:

• Fixes a crash of the CLI when an update is available due to incorrect formatting of the update message.
• Fixes an error when listing the contents of an empty directory with maestral ls.

v1.0.0

This is the first stable release of Maestral. There have been numerous bug fixes to error handling and platform integration as well as a few bug fixes to syncing itself. There are also a few outward facing changes: Pausing Maestral now cancels any pending sync jobs instead of waiting for them to be completed. The macOS GUI switches from Qt to using a native Cocoa interface and the macOS app bundle finally includes a full command line interface.

Added:

• Command line tools are now bundled with the macOS app bundle and can be installed from the settings window.
• Added support for config names with spaces.
• Switch from Qt to native Cocoa GUI on macOS.
• Expanded test suite to include sync tests.

Changed:

• Added '.dropbox' and '.dropbox.cache' to always excluded paths.
• Pausing sync now cancels all pending uploads and downloads.
• Quicker detection of connection problems.
• Faster sync of local deletions.
• The GUI now always launches a separate daemon process instead of an in-process daemon.
• Temporary files during a download are now stored inside the Dropbox directory at '.maestral.cache'. This guarantees that temporary files always reside on the same partition as the Dropbox folder itself.
• System tray icons are no longer installed in the platform theme in Linux. This is part of a workaround for a Qt issue on Linux desktops which causes unnecessarily large pixmap transfers over dBus when HiDPI support is enabled. Manually installed icons will still be respected.
• Switch from implicit grant to PKCE OAuth2 flow.
• Added public API to link a Dropbox account: Maestral.get_auth_url and Maestral.link. Frontends no longer need to import maestral.oauth.
• Moved all command line dialogs from the main API to the CLI module.
• Bumped watchdog requirement to >= 10.0.0 for more consistent error handling.
• Added explicit jeepny dependency for Linux. This is a dependency of keyring but we use it by itself as well.
• Improved the reliability of ignoring file system events caused by Maestral itself.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue where a dropped internet connection during startup could result in continuous retries until the connection is finally established.
• Fixes an issue where downloads of newly included folders would not resume after being interrupted.
• Fixes an issue which could lead to false conflicting copies of folders in some cases.
• Fixes the handling of inofify limit and permission errors when starting a file system watch.
• Fixes handling of errors from too long file names.
• Handle errors due to file names which are not allowed on the local file system.
• Fixes handling of some uncaught insufficient disk space errors.
• Fixes incorrect autostart entries on macOS.
• Fixes a crash when running Maestral as a systemd service without python-systemd installed.
• Fixes an issue when checking for updates if the list of releases from Github includes dev releases.
• Fixes an issue where only remote changes would be listed in 'Recent changes' in the GUI.
• Fixes the alignment of comboboxes in the Qt GUI on macOS.
• Fixes a crash on macOS when no notification center is available, for instance in a headless session or on Github test runners.
• Fixes a crash on Linux when the command line tool notify-send is not available.
• Fixes an issue where sync errors would have incomplete path information.
• Resolves an issue where indexing a large Dropbox folder with > 100,000 items would continuously timeout and restart in some cases.

Removed:

• Removed migration code for versions < 0.6.3. If you want to update to v1.0.0, please make sure to upgrade to at least version 0.6.3 first or unlink your Dropbox before updating to v1.0.0.
• Removed u-msgpack dependency.

v0.6.4

The release provides bug fixes and minor improvements to the command line and graphical user interfaces. Importantly, it fixes an issue where some files could accidentally ubecome n-indexed, resulting in incorrect conflict resolution.

Added:

• Config option to set the keyring backend. This defaults to 'automatic' but can be used to specify a preferred backend such as keyrings.backends.kwallet.DBusKeyring. You will need to migrate your credentials manually to the new keyring if you change this setting.
• Added a -v, --verbose flag to maestral start and maestral restart commands to print log output to stdout.
• Added an API documentation for developers, available on Read the Docs.

Changed:

• During initial CLI setup, give the option to sync the entire Dropbox without paginating through individual folders to exclude.
• Limit the number of notifications to keep in the notification center. This will only work for some desktop environments.
• Fall back to plain text credential storage if neither Gnome Keyring, KWallet or any other storage implementing the Secret Service API can be found. A warning is shown when plain text storage is used.
• Settings and setup windows are no longer always kept on top in Linux.
• maestral start --foreground no longer prints log messages to stdout by default.

Fixed:

• Properly handle errors when moving files, for instance for sync conflicts.
• Fixes an issue where some files could accidentally become un-indexed, resulting in incorrect conflict resolution.
• Fixes an issue with macOS app bundles where the migration of configuration files was omitted after an update. This would result in a failure to start the daemon.
• Correctly specify the required version of six to work around an upstream issue in Dropbox.
• Fixes an issue where stdout would end up in the systemd journal in addition to the structured log messages.
• Fixed a bug where XDG_DATA_HOME was ignored.

v0.6.3

This release fixes a critical error introduced when updating to v9.5 of the Dropbox Python SDK which prevented any remote changes from being downloaded.

Changed:

• Show release notes from all releases since last update in update dialog.
• Use our own method instead of the psuitl package to determine the CPU usage. This eliminates the psuitl dependency which can be difficult to install on some systems.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue with downloads failing because Dropbox Metadata is longer hashable from v9.5 of the Dropbox Python SDK.
• Fixed a StopIteration exception on startup when the location of the maestral CLI script cannot be found in the package metadata.
• Fixes an error when restarting the daemon with the "foreground" option.
• Fixed incorrect button labels in the setup dialog when choosing whether to replace or keep an old Dropbox folder. The labels "Replace" and "Cancel" where switched.
• Fixes a bug where the option "Unlink & Quit" in the "Revoked Access" error dialog would unlink but not quit Maestral.

v0.6.2

This release enables excluding individual files from syncing and fixes an issue which led to continuously retrying failed downloads. It also contains significant performance improvements to indexing, reduces the CPU usage when syncing a large number of files and introduces weekly re-indexing.

This release also introduces support for an ".mignore" file with the same syntax as gitignore. This feature is considered 'alpha' and may change in the future. Feedback is welcome.

Added:

• Support excluding files from sync. This uses the same 'selective sync' interface as excluding folders. Excluded files will be removed from the local Dropbox folder.
• Introduces an ".mignore" file to specify files that Maestral should ignore. The ".mignore" file must be saved in the local Dropbox folder. When excluding files or folders with selective sync (maestral exclude), they will be removed from the local folder and kept in the cloud only. The ".mignore" file enables the reverse: files or folders which exist locally will not be uploaded to Dropbox. It uses the same syntax as gitignore files and, similar to gitignore, files which are already tracked by Maestral will not be affected. More details are given in the Wiki.
• Added a config option "max_cpu_percent" to adjust the target maximum CPU usage per CPU core. This defaults to 20%, i.e., 80% total for a quad core CPU. Maestral will aim to remain below that percentage but this is not guaranteed.

Changed:

• Replaced the excluded_files and excluded_folders settings from the config file with a unified excluded_items setting. Entries from excluded_folders will be migrated to the excluded_items setting.
• Renamed methods which exclude / include folders to exclude_item etc.
• Speed up creation of local folders.
• When trying to create a file or folder with the same path as an item excluded by selective sync, the new item is now renamed by appending "selective sync conflict" instead of raising a sync issue. This is closer the behaviour of the official client.
• Significant performance improvements to indexing and file event processing. Indexing a remote Dropbox with 20,000 to 30,000 files and comparing it a local folder now takes ~ 5 min, depending on on the average file size.
• Introduced periodic reindexing every week. This has been made possible by the above performance improvements.

Fixed:

• Don't immediately retry when a download fails. Instead, save failed downloads and retry only on pause / resume or restart.
• Fixes missing cursor and resulting unexpected ValidationError during sync startup.
• Wait until all sync activity has stopped before moving the Dropbox folder. This avoids errors when trying to convert local to dropbox paths and vice versa during the move.
• Fixes an issue which would prevent some conflicting copies created by Dropbox from being downloaded.
• Correctly handle when a local item is renamed to an always excluded file name such as ".DS_STORE": the item is now deleted from Dropbox.
• Fixes an issue where sharing an existing folder from the Dropbox website would result in the folder being deleted locally. This is because Dropbox actually removes the shared folder from the user's Dropbox and then re-mounts it as a shared drive / file system. We handle this correctly now by leaving the local folder alone or deleting and re-downloading it, depending on the time elapsed between removal and re-mounting.
• Improves conflict resolution when a folder has been been replaced with a file or vice versa and both the local and remote item have un-synced changes.
• Fixes an issue where maestral stop would block until all pending syncs have completed. This could potentially take a very long time for large downloads. Instead, any interrupted downloads will be restarted on next launch.

Removed:

• Removed the excluded_files and excluded_folders settings from the config file.

v0.6.1

This release improves desktop notifications: Notifications will now only appear for remote file changes and you can chose between different notification levels (CLI only) and snooze notifications temporarily. It also reintroduces the maestral autostart command to start the sync daemon on login (requires systemd on Linux). This works independently of the GUI option "Start on login".

There have also been significant changes in package structure: the GUI has been split off into a separate package maestral-qt which will be installed with the gui extra pip3 install -U maestral[gui] or directly with pip3 install -U maestral-qt. A native Cocoa GUI (maestral-cocoa) for macOS is currently in testing and will likely be released with the next update.

Other changes include improved error handling, cleaned up config files and some tweaks to CLI commands. As always, there are several bug fixes. Thank you for all your feedback!

Added:

• New CLI command maestral autostart to start the daemon on login. This requires systemd on Linux. The "Start on login" option of the GUI remains independent and the GUI will attach to an existing daemon if it finds one.
• Added desktop notifications for errors: Serious errors such as revoked Dropbox access, deleted Dropbox folder, etc, were previously only shown in the GUI as an alert window or printed as warnings when invoking a CLI command.
• Support for different levels of desktop notifications (CLI only). You can now select between FILECHANGE, SYNCISSUE, ERROR and NONE with maestral notify LEVEL.
• Added an option to snooze notifications. In the CLI, use maestral notify snooze N to snooze notifications for N minutes. In the GUI, use the "Snooze Notifications" menu.
• Support using an existing directory when setting up Maestral through the CLI. This was previously only supported in the GUI. Files and folders in the existing directory will be merged with your Dropbox.
• The CLI command maestral restart now supports restarting Maestral into the current process instead of spawning a new process. This is enabled by passing the -f, --foreground option.
• Added a native Cocoa GUI for macOS. This removes the PyQt5 dependency for macOS and reduces the size of the bundled app from 50 MB to 15 MB. It also eliminates a few inconsistencies in GUI appearance. Especially the sync issues window looks a lot better (hopefully you won't see it too often).

Changed:

• Split off GUI into separate python packages (maestral-qt, maestral-cocoa).
• Notify only for remote changes and not for those which originated locally. This should significantly reduce the number of unwanted notifications.
• Renamed maestral notifications to maestral notify for brevity.
• Renamed the set-dir command to move-dir to emphesize that it moves the local Dropbox folder to a new location.
• Configurations are now tied to a Dropbox account:
  • New configurations are now created on-demand when calling maestral gui or maestral start with a new configuration name.
  • A configuration is automatically removed when unlinking a Dropbox account.
  • All configurations can be listed together with the account emails with maestral configs. This replaces maestral config list.
• For app bundles on macOS, you can now pass a config option -c, --config-name to the bundle's executable ("Maestral.app/Contents/MacOS/main"). It will then use the specified configuration if it already exists or to create a new one.
• The GUI no longer restarts after completing the setup dialog.
• Removed sync and application state info from the config file. Sync and application states are now saved separately in '/.local/share/maestral/CONFIG_NAME.state' on Linux and '/Library/Application Support/maestral/CONFIG_NAME.state' on macOS.
• Use atomic save to prevent corruption of the sync index if Maestral crashes or is killed during a save.
• Moved the sync index to the same folder as the application state.
• Improved conflict detection and resolution when changing files which are currently being uploaded or downloaded.

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue where local changes while maestral was not running could be overwritten by remote changes instead of resulting in a conflicting copy.
• Fixes an issue where local file events could be ignored while a download is in progress.
• Fixes an issue where a new local file could be incorrectly deleted if it was created just after a remote item at the same path was deleted.
• Fixes an issue where maestral stop and maestral restart would not interrupt running sync jobs but instead wait for them to be completed. Now, aborted jobs will be resumed when starting Maestral again.
• Correctly handle when a folder is replaced by a file and vice versa.
• Correctly handle additional error types: internal Dropbox server error, insufficient space on local drive, file name too long for local file system and out-of-memory error.
• Automatically resume upload in case of dropped packages instead of raising a sync issue.
• Set the log level for the systemd journal according to user settings instead of always using logging.DEBUG.
• Run checks for Dropbox folder location and link status when invoking maestral restart.
• Notify the user through the GUI when moving the Dropbox directory fails instead of silently keeping the old directory.
• Fixes an issue where the environment variable XDG_DATA_DIR would not be respected in Linux.

Removed:

• Removed "-a" option from maestral ls. List all entries by default, even if they start with a period.
• Removed the maestral config command group. Configurations are now created and deleted on-demand and can be listed with maestral configs.

v0.5.2

Added:

• Added automatic crash and error reporting with bugsnag. This is disabled by default and can be enabled in the Settings pane or with the command maestral analytics -Y. The information sent with the bug report contains a traceback, the Python version, basic platform information (e.g, 'Darwin-19.2.0-x86_64-i386-64bit') and potentially the version of PyQt5 and the user's desktop environment. No personal information will be shared.

Changed:

• Improved the code which handles multiple configurations: Explicitly pass the config name to classes instead of keeping it as a global variable.
• Improved starting of the daemon: ensure that the right python executable is used.
• Order of commands returned by maestral --help by importance instead of alphabetically.
• Sync errors will now be listed by maestral status if present.
• Live updates to the Settings window when settings are changed from the command line.

Fixed:

• Fixed an issue on macOS where some directory deletions could be ignored in case of rapid successive deletions.
• Fixed an unexpected exception when attempting to create a directory that already exists. Do not rely on the exists_ok parameter in os.makedirs but catch FileExistsError explicitly (see https://bugs.python.org/issue13498).
• Fixed an AttributeError when a local folder is replaced by file: the Dropbox metadata of the folder will not have a content hash. This mostly occurs when modifying a folder structure programmatically, for instance with git.
• Fixed an AttributeError when a remote file has been replaced by a folder before its changes could be downloaded: the Dropbox metadata of the folder will not have a content hash.
• Fixed an bug introduced in v0.5.0 which would cause rebuilding the index to block indefinitely.
• Fixed a crash of the GUI when closing the settings window shortly after closing the "Chose folders to sync..." dialog. This was caused by QThreads being destroyed while the threads were still running.
• Fixed an issue where the local revision number of a file could be set to 'folder', resulting in an exception from the Dropbox API.
• Fixed a bug when the "relink dialog" (shown when Maestral's Dropbox access has expired) might use the wrong Dropbox account when syncing multiple accounts.
• Fixed an issue with imports in Pyro5 5.7 which prevented the daemon from starting.

Removed:

• Removed the command maestral errors from the CLI.

v0.5.0

This release improves the sync reliability in case of rapid successive changes to the local Dropbox folder. It also improves error handling and includes other bug fixes. This may be considered the first release candidate for a stable v1.0.0.

Added:

• Show a small bell on top of system tray icon in case of sync issues.
• Notify the user when the local Dropbox folder contains too many items to watch and recommend increasing the maximum number of inotify watches (Linux only).
• Notify the user when an upload fails because a file exceeds the size limit of 350 GB.
• Notify the user when an upload fails due to dropped network packages.
• Adds a command line option maestral link -r to relink to an existing account without resetting the sync state. This is the equivalent of the GUI 'relink dialog'.

Changed:

• Refines some error messages.
• Improves error handling in CLI: avoid printing full Python tracebacks to the console. Print concise and actionable error messages instead if possible.
• Improves formatting of maestral ls output.
• Improves status notifications for large uploads: dynamically adapt the unit to show up to four significant digits (e.g., "16MB/1.6GB" instead of "0/1.6GB").
• Reduces memory footprint of macOS app by stripping doc strings (at least 5MB in dropbox package only).

Fixed:

• Fixes multiple sync issues and corner cases due to rapid and successive file changes: The algorithm which combines successive changes of a local file to a single file event (created / deleted / modified / moved) has been simplified and improved.
• Fixes an issue which could cause the watchdog thread to crash silently on case- sensitive file systems when saving changes to a file.
• Removes sip import because it may fail depending on how PyQt was installed.
• Fixed an issue where user notifications would not appear for certain implementations of 'notify-send'.
• Fixes an error when setting the log level from the CLI.
• Fixes an error when relinking Maestral through the GUI after its Dropbox access has been revoked.

v0.4.4

This updates focuses on bug fixes and performance improvements. Notably, it reduces the memory usage of the GUI by ~ 30MB. If you are upgrading from v0.2.4 or earlier, please perform an incremental update to v0.4.3 first (see Removed section).

Changed:

• Show a progress dialog while checking for updates when requested by the user.
• Show an error message when the GUI cannot connect to or start a sync daemon.
• Reduces the memory footprint of the GUI by ~ 30 MB by avoiding Dropbox API imports and deleting QtWidgets when they are not visible.
• Changing the log level (e.g., maestral log level DEBUG) no longer requires a restart of the maestral daemon to become effective.
• maestral set-dir now takes the new path as an argument: maestral set-dir PATH. If not given, the user will be prompted to input a path or use the default.
• Migrated from Pyro4 to Pyro5 for communication with sync daemon.

Fixed:

• Fixes an unhandled error when trying to upload changes to a file which is not currently indexed by Maestral.
• Fixes an unhandled error when attempting to calculate the content hash of a file which has been deleted locally. This can occur after Maestral has been notified of remote changes to a file which is deleted locally before comparing file contents.
• Fixes a bug which could result in multiple false "conflicting copies" of a file when the user modifies the file while it is being uploaded.
• Fixes a regression bug which would prevent the creation and selection of new configs for different Dropbox accounts.
• Fixes a bug that would prevent Maestral from properly shutting down a sync daemon which was started from the GUI. This was a result of the daemon's sync threads not exiting as long as a parent process from the same process group is still alive (the GUI in our case). We prevent this by using "double-fork" magic to properly orphan the daemon process so that init will perform its cleanup. See Stevens' "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" for details (ISBN 0201563177).
• Fixes an issue where the application launcher which is used to start Maestral on login in Linux may be untrusted.
• Fixes an issue where maestral set-dir would fail if the new directory is the same as the old directory.

Removed:

• Removed code to migrate config files and sync indices from Maestral versions prior to v0.2.5.
• Removed code to migrate authentication keys to the system keyring when upgrading from v0.1.2 or earlier.

v0.4.3

Fixed:

• Fixes a bug which would prevent periodic update checks from running.
• Fixes an issue where the system tray icon would not be displayed on Qt 5.13.1 with enabled HighDpi support.
• Fixes an issue which would prevent system tray icons from loading on Gnome 3.
• Fixes and issue which would prevent macOS binaries from running due to the team ID missing in the a code-signing certificate. Note that, even though the macOS binary is code-signed, the certificate is not from Apple's Developer Program. Therefore, to run the app, you will have to "right-lick -> Open".

Changed:

• Tweaked system tray icon design.
• Use NSUserNotificationCenter when running from Python outside of an app bundle.

Removed:

• Removed automatic detection of Gnome screen scaling factors because it caused problems on a few desktop environments. Set the environment variable QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS instead to enable it manually if required.

v0.4.2

Added:

• Added a command maestral activity which gives a live view of all items queued for syncing or currently being synced.

Fixed:

• Fixes crash of the sync thread when attempting to download a file from Dropbox which has been deleted after it has been queued for download but before the actual download attempt.
• Fixes crash of the sync thread when attempting to upload a file to Dropbox which has been deleted after it has been queued for upload but before the actual upload attempt.
• Fixes a bug where the revision number of a file could be incorrectly set to "folder".
• Fixes a crash of the sync thread while indexing local changes (after a restart) if an indexed item has been deleted before we could check if it is a file or a folder.
• Fixes a bug where newly downloaded files could be immediately re-uploaded in some cases.
• Fixes a crash on startup when started as systemd service with watchdog.

v0.4.1

This release focuses on bug fixes and performance improvements. Notable changes are:

• You can now rebuild Maestral's index from the command line with maestral rebuild- index.
• Communication between the sync daemon and frontend (GUI or CLI) is faster and more secure.
• Improved system tray notifications.

Here is the list of all changes:

Added:

• Added maestral rebuild-index command to CLI.
• Added support for systemd software watchdog (see #55).

Changed:

• Renamed command maestral config new to maestral config add.
• Renamed command maestral config delete to maestral config remove.
• Improved system tray notifications:
  • Display the name of the user who changed a file
  • Added app-icon and and -name to Linux notifications.
  • Migrated macOS notifications from NSUserNotificationCenter (deprecated) to UNUserNotificatioCenter for macOS Mojave and higher.
• Improved appearance of unlink dialog: show spinning progress indicator and perform unlink in the background.
• Show menu entry "No recent files" when there are no recently changed files to display.
• Use Unix domain sockets instead of TCP/IP sockets for communication with daemon. This means that communication is lighter, faster and more secure (other users on the same PC can no longer connect to your sync daemon).
• Use NSTemporaryDirectory on macOS as runtime dir.
• Simplified code for the initial sync.

Fixed:

• Fixes a bug where the CLI setup dialog could fail when choosing to replace an existing Dropbox folder.
• Fixes a bug which would cause maestral start to hang indefinitely if the daemon is not created successfully (see #57).
• Fixes a bug which would cause maestral unlink to fail when the Maestral daemon is still running.
• Fixes a bug where the Maestral GUI would show a paused icon during the initial sync after setup.
• Fixes a bug where the menu bar item "Pause Syncing" would not change to "Resume Syncing" when pausing sync through the CLI via maestral pause (and vice versa).
• Catch unexpected exceptions in sync threads and display to user instead of crashing.
• Do not upload changes to an excluded folder but raise a sync issue instead.
• Fixes wrong color of system tray / menu bar icon on macOS when clicked in light-mode.
• Fixes a regression bug from v0.4.0 which caused the creation of new configs for separate Dropbox accounts to fail silently.
• Fixes a bug which could result in a missing sync cursor when running the Maestral thafter e initial setup. This would come from parallel access to the config files from tha read spawned by the setup dialog and the Maestral daemon itself. We now make sure ththat e setup dialog leaves no threads behind after exiting.
• Fixes a bug which could cause false sync errors when adding a nested folder structure to the local Dropbox folder.
• Fixes bug in converting Dropbox DeleteErrors due to an invalid path to MaestralApiErrors.
• Fixes a bug which would prevent Maestral from detecting local changes to files that are part of a batch which is currently being downloaded.
• Fixes a bug where the user may be asked to create a new keyring in a non-default wallet if multiple wallets are available on first start (see #56). See jaraco/keyring#391 for the current behaviour of Python keyring.
• Fixes a bug which could cause the Maestral daemon to be started with a different PATH than the invoking command (see #57).
• Fixes a bug where changes to a file which is not synced locally would trigger "file added" instead of "file modified" notifications.

v0.4.0

Main changes are:

• Support the exclusion of subfolders.
• Check and notify if updates are available.
• Decoupled GUI and sync daemon.
• Cleaned up the command line interface. Use maestral start instead of maestral daemon start and maestral start --foreground instead of maestral sync.
• Bug fixes and performance improvements.

Details are given below.

Added:

• Method to get the sync status of individual files or folders. This is also accessible through the CLI via maestral file-status LOCAL_PATH. In the future, this could be used by file manager plugins to overlay the sync status of files.
• Support to exclude subfolders in the main API, CLI and GUI.
• Added a command group maestral excluded to view and manage excluded folders. Available commands are add, remove and show.
• For case-sensitive file systems: Automatically rename created items which have the same name as an existing item, but with a different case. This avoids possible issues on case-sensitive file systems since Dropbox itself is not case-sensitive.
• GUI notifications when a new version of Maestral is available, configurable to daily, weekly, monthly or never.
• A new "Check for updates..." menu entry.
• Better integration with systemd: When the daemon is started from systemd, status updates and ready / stopping signals are sent to systemd and the log is sent to the journal instead of stdout. This requires the installation of the systemd extra as pip3 install -U maestral[systemd], which will install sdnotify and systemd- python. The latter may require you install additional packages through your system's package manager first. See here for installation instructions.

Changed:

• Separated daemon and CLI code into different modules.
• Simplified CLI:
  • Moved commands from maestral daemon to main command group, i.e., maestral daemon start is now maestral start.
  • Removed maestral sync. Use maestral start --foreground instead.
• GUI now uses only the main Maestral API which is exposed over sockets.
• Changed returned values of the Maestral API to Python types only for better serialisation.
• GUI now starts its own daemon on demand or attaches to an existing one. This daemon will run in a separate process, unless started from a macOS App bundle.
• Improved startup time for large folders: Moved indexing of local files after a restart to the upload_thread.
• Sync engine moved to a submodule.
• Setup dialog no longer returns a Maestral instance on success but just True. It is up to the GUI to create or attach to a Maestral daemon.

Fixed:

• Fixed an incorrect error being raised for a corrupted rev file, which could lead to a crash or misleading error message.
• Fixed a bug which would cause a renamed file with a previously invalid name not to sync to Dropbox.
• Fixed a bug in the GUI which would cause clicking on a recently changed file to reveal the wrong item in the file manager.
• Fixed a bug which would cause the sync thread to crash when attempting to follow a broken symlink (#50). Now, the error will be reported to the user as a sync issue. Thanks to @michaelbjames for the fix.
• Fixes a bug where the Dropbox path is not reset when aborting the setup dialog.

Removed:

• Removed the CLI command maestral sync. Use maestral start --foreground instead.

v0.3.2

This release fixes a bug that could result in only changes of top-level items being synced. This affects users who carried out the initial linking with Maestral v0.2.5 or later and selected to exclude folders before the first download. Users affected by this should rebuild Maestral's index by selecting "Rebuild index..." in the main menu.

Other improvements include expanded command line scripts with more useful output, minor bug fixes and small tweaks to the UI.

Added:

• Added a "status" property to maestral.main which shows the last log message.
• Added a command group maestral log to view and clear the log as well set the logging level. Commands are:
  • maestral log show: Shows the logs in terminal.
  • maestral log clear: Clears the logs.
  • maestral log level: Returns the current log level.
  • maestral log level [DEBUG|INFO|WARNING|ERROR]: Sets the log level to the given value. Affects both stdout and file logs.
• Added an option "-a" to maestral ls to include hidden files.
• Added tooltips for system tray icon when not on macOS.

Changed:

• Made log levels persistent between sessions.
• Changed the name of maestral list to maestral ls and, by default, do not list "hidden" items that start with a dot. Added an option "-a" to explicitly list all files in a directory.
• Improved output from command line scripts:
  • Wrap all long outputs in empty lines.
  • Show more informative status.
  • Show Dropbox folder location in account-info.
  • Add colours to outputs like "[OK]" and "[FAILED]".
• Set minimum version requirement for click package.
• Reduced the startup time by downloading profile picture in a thread. Periodically update in the background (every 20 min).
• Check hashes before uploading modified files. This speeds up re-linking an old folder by orders of magnitude.
• Enable the creation of multiple autostart entries for different configurations.
• Fall back to PNG tray icons if the platform may not support our svg format.

Fixed:

• Fixed a bug which would not allow running maestral for the first time before explicitly adding a configuration with maestral config new. Now, a default configuration is created automatically on first run.
• Prevent the GUI and a daemon from syncing the same folder at the same time.
• Fixed the creation of multiple daemons. A new daemon will no longer overwrite an old one and maestral daemon start will do nothing if a daemon for the given configuration is already running.
• Automatic allocation of ports for the communication between daemon and client.
• Show the (Dropbox) file path in the string representation of MaestralApiError. Previously, one could not see from the traceback which file caused the error.
• Fixed a bug that would result in only changes of top-level items being synced. This affects users who carrier out the initial linking with Maestral v0.2.5 or later (commit 40be316b49f2198a01cc9ce9b804f8e6336e36f8) and selected to exclude folders before the initial sync. Users affected by this bug should rebuild Maestral's index by selecting "Rebuild index..." in the main menu.

Removed:

• No longer install a script "maestral-gui". Use "maestral gui" instead.

v0.3.1

Fixed:

• Fixes a bug when calling the command line script maestral daemon errors. This bug was the result of an error in pickling our MaestralApiExceptions (see https://bugs.python.org/issue1692335#msg310951 for a discussion).

v0.3.0

This release includes several significant changes. The largest are:

1. Support for multiple Dropbox accounts (via the command line)
2. A Maestral daemon for the command line
3. A redesigned settings window with more prominent account information

The detailed list of changes is:

Added:

• Maestral can now be started as a daemon from the command line. A new command group maestral daemon has been introduced to manage this.
• Added support for custom Dropbox folder names. The folder name must be set with the command line scripts.
• Added a new command group maestral config to manage multiple Maestral configurations for different Dropbox accounts.
• Added a new command line option --config-name or -c to select the configuration file to use.
• Improved grouping and naming of command line scripts.
• Added a "relink" dialog which is shown when Maestral's Dropbox access has expired or has been revoked by the user.
• Improved logic to detect system tray color and set icons accordingly. This is mostly for KDE which, unlike Gnome, does not handle automatically adapting its tray icon colours.

Changed:

• Animated setup dialog.
• Redesigned the settings window to show more prominent account information.
• Improved command line and GUI flows for setting or moving the Dropbox folder location.
• Moved to an Implicit Grant OAuth2 flow. This does not require an app secret to be stored in the client source code. Maestral will therefore no longer require the user to get their own API keys or to use the precompiled oauth binaries hosted on PyPI.
• Improved the user massages given by command line scripts.
• Improved status messages given in RebuildIndexDialog.
• Unified and improved the creation of QThreads by the GUI to perform background tasks. This fixes an issue with occasional segfaults RebuildIndexDialog and improves the reliability of the UI.
• Started to work on providing a top-level API in Maestral for all functionality that is required by the UI. There should be no need to interact with Monitor or UpDownSync directly for high-level functionality.

Fixed:

• Fixed a crash on startup if the Meastral's Dropbox access has expired or has been revoked.
• Fixed handling of ListFolder errors. Those will only occur when the user gives an incorrect folder name to list and will (hopefully) never be caused my Maestral itself.

v0.2.6

This release fixes a critical bug which would cause Maestral to get stuck after the initial sync. This does not affect users who have already performed the initial sync with a previous version of Maestral.

Added:

• Added a context menu entry to the "Sync issues" window to show a file on dropbox.com.

Changed:

• Move logs to '$XDG_CACHE_HOME/maestral' on Linux and '~/Library/Logs/maestral' on macOS.
• Reduce the number of Dropbox API calls during initial sync.

Fixed:

• Fixed a bug which would cause Maestral to get stuck after the initial download.
• Fixes an issue in macOS where modal dialogs in the settings window would sometimes appear behind the window instead of in front of it.

v0.2.5

This release fixes several sync issues which could occur when the internet connection is lost during a sync. It also notifies the user if Maestral's access to their Dropbox has been revoked.

Added:

• Handle expired or invalidated Dropbox access.
• Ask the user before overriding an existing folder in the setup dialog.
• Added status updates for large file uploads (e.g., "Uploading 10/545MB...").

Changed:

• Significant speedup of initial indexing. Excluded folders or subfolders will no longer be indexed.
• Save config files in the systems default location: '$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/maestral' or '.config/maestral' in Linux and '~/Library/Application Support/maestral' on macOS.

Fixed:

• Fixed a false "Dropbox folder cannot be found" message which would appear when quitting and restarting Maestral during the first sync. Now, the initial download is quietly resumed when relaunching Maestral.
• Fixed an issue where an interrupted upload would not resume without restarting Maestral.
• Fixed an issue where file changes while "offline" would sometimes not be synced to Dropbox when a connection is reestablished.
• Fixed an issue where errors from requests would inadvertently get caught instead of being raised.

v0.2.4

This version mainly improves the appearance and responsiveness of the GUI specifically on Linux platforms with a Gnome desktop. It also introduces a dialog to handle a deleted or moved Dropbox folder.

Added:

• Added a "Select all" option when choosing which folders to sync.
• Handle deleted or moved Dropbox folder in setup dialog.
• Handle deleted or moved Dropbox folder while Maestral is running.

Changed:

• Improved performance of the GUI on some Gnome systems in case of many rapid status changes.
• Show system tray icon already during the setup dialog.

Fixed:

• Fixed size of the system tray icon in Gnome desktops with high-DPI scaling.
• Fixed a bug which would result in an error dialog being shown for "normal" sync errors such as an invalid file name.
• Fixed missing line-breaks in the traceback shown by the error dialog.
• Updated console scripts to reflect changes in MaestralMonitor and MaestralApiClient.

v0.2.3

This release mainly fixes crashes of the setup dialog and contains tweaks to the UI.

Changed:

• Launch into setup dialog if no Dropbox authentication token can be found in keychain.
• Only log messages of level ERROR or higher to file.
• Show account email in the system tray menu above space usage.
• Unified the code for error dialogs and added an app icon to all dialogs.

Fixed:

• Fixed a bug which could could result in the user being asked to re-authenticate when no Dropbox folder is detected on startup.
• Fixed a bug which could cause Maestral to crash during the setup dialog, immediately after user authentication.

v0.2.2

Added:

• Added support for file and folder names with two or more periods.
• Temporary autosave files that are created by macOS are now detected by their extension and excluded from syncing.
• More fine-grained errors, subclassed from MaestralApiError.
• Log all events of level INFO and higher to a rotating file in '~/.maestral/logs'. The log folder size will never exceed 6 MB.

Changed:

• Better handling when Dropbox resets a cursor: retry any files_list_folder calls and prompt the user to rebuild the index on files_list_folder_longpoll calls.
• Prepare for G-suite Dropbox integration: G-suite files such as Google docs and sheets will not be downloadable but can only be exported. Maestral will ignore such files.
• Moved deprecated API calls to v2.
• Better handling of OSErrors on download.
• Tweaks to logo.

Fixed:

• Fixed a bug which would prevent some error dialogs from being shown to the user.
• Fixed a bug which would cause the setup dialog to crash after linking to Dropbox.

v0.2.1

Changed:

• Reload all file and folder icons when the system appearance changes: the system may provide different icons (e.g., darker folder icons in "dark mode" on macOS Mojave).
• Improved notification centre alerts in macOS: when installed as a bundled app, notifications are now properly sent from the Maestral itself, showing the Maestral icon, instead of through apple script.
• Improved layout of the "Rebuild index" dialog.

Fixed:

• Fixes a bug which would prevent Meastral from starting on login: the correct startup script is now called.

v0.2.0

Major changes

Added:

• Proper handling of sync errors. Dropbox API errors are converted to a more informative MaestralApiError and a log of sync errors is kept. This log is cleared as sync errors are resolved. Errors are now handled as follows: - Individual file sync errors are indicated by the system tray icon changing. The can listed by the user through the GUI. - Unexpected errors or major errors which prevent Maestral from functioning (e.g., a corrupted index) trigger an error dialog.

• Introduced a new panel "View Sync Issues..." to show an overview of sync issues and their cause (invalid file name, insufficient space on Dropbox, etc...)

• Added a new function to rebuild Maestral's file index which is accessible through the GUI.

• Added "Recently Changed Files" submenu to the system tray menu. "Recently Changed Files" shows entries for the 30 last-changed files (synced folders only) and navigates to the respective file in the default file manager when an entry is clicked.

Changed:

• Refactored sync code: Collected all sync functionality in a the new class monitor.UpDownSync. MaestralClient now only handles access to the Dropbox API itself but is no longer concerned with version tracking, etc. MaestralClient no longer catches Dropbox API errors but raises them, augmented with useful information, as MaestralApiError.
• Moved storage of user authentication tokens from a text file to the system keyring. As a result, authentication tokens will be encrypted on the hard drive and only decrypted when the user logs in. On some systems, this may cause problems in headless mode, when the Gnome keyring is not loaded. The keyring documentation provides help for such cases.

Minor changes

Added:

• Added progress messages for uploads and downloads, e.g., "Downloading 3/98...". These are output as info messages and shown in the status field of the system tray menu.
• When unlinking your Dropbox account through the GUI, Maestral is restarted to enter the setup dialog.
• Refinements for dark interface themes such as Dark Mode in macOS Mojave

Changed:

• Use native system icons instead of macOS icons to represent files and folders.
• Some programs save file changes by deleting the old file and creating a new file. This is now correctly combined to a single FileModified event.
• Some programs create temporary files when saving changes. Those temporary files are deleted again after the save is completed. Those FileCreated and FileDeleted events, which occur in quick succession, are now ignored by Maestral.
• The following file names have been added to the exclusion list:
  • Files that start with "~$" or ".~"
  • Files that start with "~" and end with ".tmp"
• Cleaned up some of the config module code: removed Spyder specific functions and obsolete Python 2 compatibility.
• Adapted code to correctly load resources in case Maestral is packaged as a macOS app bundle.

Fixed:

• Fixed a bug which may result in a removed folder not being deleted locally if it contains subfolders.
• Fixed a bug which may result in file modifications not being uploaded, depending on how the changes were saved by the program which was used to edit the file.
• Fixed a bug which would incorrectly list top level files as folders in the "Exclude folders" dialog.
• Truncate entries in the "Recently Changed Files" menu if their width exceeds 200 pixels.
• Fixed a bug which would cause Maestral to crash when clicking "Choose folders to sync..." while Maestral cannot connect to Dropbox servers.

v0.1.2

Added:

• Added new command line option 'autostart' to automatically start Maestral on login.

Changed:

• Limit notifications to remote changes only and only notify for changes in folders that currently being synced, unless more than 100 files have changed.
• Detect colour of system tray and invert icon colour automatically if not on macOS.
• Shut down immediately and kill threads instead of waiting for timeout.
• Improve appearance of Settings window in GTK 3 style.

Fixed:

• Fixed a bug which would cause uploads to fail if they are split into multiple chunks.
• Fixed a bug that would prevent Maestral from quitting if the setup dialog is aborted.
• Fixed a bug that would cause Maestral to crash during the setup dialog when switching multiple times between the "Select Folders to Sync" and "Select Dropbox location" panels.
• Do not upload files that have identical content on Dropbox. Previously: files were always uploaded and conflict checking was left to do by the Dropbox server.

v0.1.1

Fixed:

• Fixes an issue which would prevent newly created empty folders from being synced.
• Remove references to conda in startup script.