Request: All files available offline by default

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.