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BDGeorgia's avatar
BDGeorgia
Helpful | Level 5
3 years ago

Backup EVERYTHING to external hard drive on Mac

I have a professional account with about 2TB of data that includes folders on my iMac and online-only folders as well.  I want to backup ALL of this information to an external hard drive and need som...
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Jay's avatar
Jay
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
3 years ago

Hi BDGeorgia, thanks for messaging the Community.

 

Aside from manually downloading files and folders from the site directly onto the external drive, there isn't another method to do so on a Mac device.

 

I'll leave this thread open for other users to post their suggestions.

  • BDGeorgia's avatar
    BDGeorgia
    Helpful | Level 5
    3 years ago

    Thanks for the feedback Jay.  So DROPBOX, why don't you fix this situation for your clients?  I cannot be the only one who wants and needs this type of feature/capability.  Thanks!

    • dd_nvidia's avatar
      dd_nvidia
      New member | Level 2
      3 years ago

      it's not possible using Apple's APIs on the newer OS to do this without doing it on a bodged kind of way.

       

      Personally, i was thinking of maybe setting up a VM in MacOS and having dropbox run in the VM on either an older MacOS version or some other OS with a version of dropbox that does support sync, have the external drive shared as a "network drive" somehow maybe that could maybe allow native usb interface with my main host machine running MacOS 13 as well as the VM - that way the VM does the syncing and the file structure sits as is on the drive for the host system to read/edit.

       

       

      This would be a terrible idea for battery life and especially optimising performance - but VMs are quick to suspend and start again so yeah, that's the idea i've got to fix atm until Dropbox maybe come up with something more elegant 

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