Request: All files available offline by default

I was a paid OneDrive user and some time ago the "online ony" issue of OneDrive pressed me to Dropbox (not a paid user yet), and now it seems Dropbox is making the same transition...

Too bad that maybe we'll have to go back to the good old time of portable USB sticks... 

If it is Apple behind all these and Dropbox (and OneDrive, etc.) has no choice, is it because Apple wants to kill all the other cloud sync services so that every macOS user will be using iCloud?

Before the latest update (v163.4.5456), when I placed something in my local dropbox folder (Mac), it would automatically sync, and be available offline (green check mark). Now, when I put something in the folder, it only shows a cloud icon to the right of the file, and I have to manually make it available offline. This is pointlessly irritating. Is there a way to make it go back to the previous behavior?

I create a pdf using my phone using Dropbox, which uploads to Cloud.  The corresponding folder on my laptop used to get the file.  It would be seen by HAZEL then moved out to another folder and used for work purposes.  Work flow worked great until I did the recent MAC upgrade that moved the Dropbox folder to the path user/library/CloudStorage.

I have given DropBox full disk access, the FILE is showing up in the folder, but showing as not downloaded.  The online app shows the folders as synched.  But the folder on laptop shows file as not being downloaded.  As a result rest of workflow won't work.  When I click on the cloud, it downloads and all works as it did before.

I have checked the boxes so all files will be downloaded.

Can't find an 'auto download' button that I might have missed.

Thoughts

Be careful with online only files.  Apparently if you move them, the system will just completely delete the files off your system from Finder leaving you with a 0 byte placeholder and it doesn't auto download any online files before moving it.  OneDrive doesn't do this.  Just be forewarned.  

I strongly feel this to be due to certain mandatory rules (not known to the end users) from the Apple side, because neither Dropbox nor OneDrive would voluntarily implement such behavior which completely sabotages their own products.

OneDrive will download the files before it moves the file.  Dropbox will not even try to download the file.  It just moves the placeholder.  Regardless of "oh, this is Apple" or whatever, the fact that it does it means that it should disable online only until it finds a way to fix it.

The fact OneDrive doesn't have this problem seems to indicate that Dropbox could fix it but hasn't yet.

Of course, it's not deliberate.  I had someone from Dropbox say "well, you should just download them first...."  That is a cop-out to the problem.  That's an answer someone gives from tech support when they have no interest in fixing it.  And that's their choice... fine.  I have choices too and now have to consider them because of this bug. 

I have a 30 days to recover what I see as missing files and if even 1 file is missing because it was marked online only inside a subfolder, now I have a problem if I don't realize it's missing in 30 days.  It doesn't make sense why I'd want a 0kB placeholder file and why people think this is "by design" or what someone should see and learn a lesson from.... it's just apathy to the problem.

just resolved my issue by right clicking on the Dropbox folder (buried in user/Library/CloudStorage/DROPBOX) and scrolling to 'Make available offline' (as mentioned by pervious post).

Could NOT find this menu option anywhere else.

The "Make Available Offline" option as described by chhawkes does seems to bring back functionality as it used to be.  I hope it is persistent with upgrades.  I made that change a couple of days ago, it has persisted through a computer restart as well as the MacOS update to Ventura 13.1.

I was able to create a document on my iPhone via the "Scan" function, and within seconds the document appeared in my root Dropbox folder as it always had in the past.

What is strange about this procedure is there is no feedback on what is happening. No indication of the current setting. Normally, when you make changes, there's something showing the current state, then you make your change and that change is indicated in some manner. When you do the procedure mention, you don't have a lot of confidence that it's actually working. I've started just putting everything on a USB flash drive, just like we did 20 years ago.

What a regression for Dropbox. It used to be the most reliable cloud service. I would just totally trust the checkmark in the menu bar: I would be 100% sure that my file was locally available on all of my desktops. Not anymore! I might have to check manually because it might well be Dropbox just put there a placeholder, and the only way I have to proceed is to select again on the Dropbox folder "Make available offline" anyway with no feedback! It might well be that some file added later is just downoloaded as a placeholder, and I will never discover it in the my folder hierarchy... 

Dropbox was fun while it lasted. However, with large capacity USB sticks being relatively inexpensive. I have found it's easier and more reliable to just make a copy of my documents file and travel with it. Anything that I alter I put in a unique folder where I put it back where it was on my main Mac.

Ultimately I find that the new behavior works pretty well, but the above comment about feedback is the big remaining issue.

You can right click the same folder you already set to "Make offline" and the option is still there. So you can re-click it over and over, which seems wrong.

From what I can tell, none of the visual indicators are 100% reliable to show that content (and most importantly, sub-folders and new files within) will all download automatically within a folder.

So I'm optimistic that things seem to be working much better, but the lack of indications still leave a lot of anxiety. This was the great thing about the old "always offline" preference feature. You set it and knew that Dropbox would always do what you wanted.

The crux of this issue is a conflict in expectation between two simple icons. The green check icon supposedly means "Available Offline". But the gray cloud icon means "Not Downloaded". It seems to me that these two should be mutually exclusive. Either it's available offline OR it's not downloaded. There should be no hybrid state.

When I go to that path and click make files available offline it doesn't do anything at all. Were there any other steps you did first such as reinstalling dropbox?

chhawkes

The green icon means it's synced and online. The grey icon means it's not downloaded locally.