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Request: All files available offline by default
Moving the Mac to the new File Provider is great - very happy this is finally happening and support on the new M1 is much better. Kudos!
Feature request: Really miss the feature to have Dropbox...
Hi everyone, and thanks for your patience.
We're re-launching the option to choose the default status of synced files in the Dropbox desktop application (in the Preferences > Sync tab) for users of the newer File Provider version.
It should be available to you shortly. If you haven't received it yet, make sure to update your desktop app, and let us know if you have any questions!
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.
The green icon means it's synced and online. The grey icon means it's not downloaded locally.
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