dbxmirror lets you maintain a (read-only) mirror of a Dropbox folder tree and efficiently keep it up to date.

"Why not just use rclone?" you may ask. The main difference is dbxmirror is stateful, in that it keeps track of what it's fetched already, and instead of asking Dropbox for a full recursive directory listing every time, only asks for updates since the last sync. On a large directory tree, this is a pretty significant speed-up.

1. Run dbxmirror setup /root-path in the destination directory. It will prompt for authentication, requiring a Dropbox API app key. /root-path is any path in your Dropbox, and may be / to sync the whole thing.

2. Optionally run dbxmirror ignore add /some/other/path to mark paths to exclude.

3. Run dbxmirror pull to make the local directory match Dropbox.

4. Later on you may run dbxmirror check to verify that the local state matches what is expected.

Be advised that dbxmirror creates a file .dbxmirror.db in the root of the destinatiton local directory, which is a sqlite database and contains your Dropbox authentication token, so protect it accordingly.