External drive auto backup

I too have this problem of my external drive not showing up as an option in Backup. I've tried all of the suggestions in the help documents and in this conversation thread. I've talked with several people at Support, who are either sales people or technical people who don't seem to have a solution but won't say so.

I have a Personal Plus subscription with lots of space available. No issue there. My external drive is formatted in one of the accepted formats. Is there a solution to this problem? If so, what is it?

I have also been unable to get clear (admittedly clear to me, a non-specalist!) information or help from Dropbox.

I have at least reached the point where, in my Preferences, I have removed the option of automatic synchronisation of Desktop and Documents, which took me far beyond my limit on the Basic Version. Only Downloads remains, and I actually download into a folder in Dropbox, so the hard disc folder remains empty.

Before I found out how to do this, Dropbox used to start downloading so many things from my hard disc that I was quickly over the limit.

Why don't I move to a higher option? Well, I use Dropbox strictly for safeguarding the files I am working on or recent ones, and about once a month I transfer all completed work to the hard disc. This takes a bit of time, but gives me a chance to revise what I am keeping. I also keep two copies on external hard discs (using AllwaysSync for this synchronisation). In other words, I use Dropbox on line, and all my other content is stored locally.

Thank you for your reply, DenisM5. It helps to hear that you've been unable to get a clear response either.  I'll stop wasting my time beating that bush. I too have two local backups. A sync'd cloud backup of my external drive seemed like a good part of a disaster plan, especially since I have plenty of room in my Personal Plus plan. I'll look elsewhere for options.

In my experience it is not fixed. I still cannot get a prompt for my older Seagate drives. It does work, however for a new SanDisk SSD drive that I acquired. In any case, the feature is poorly documented and designed so I probably wouldn't trust it even if I got it working. They need to make external drive backup configurable in the Dropbox preferences instead of using this unreliable prompt. And yes, Dropbox support appears to be useless in regards to this issue.

I finally ended up putting my Dropbox folder on an external drive and putting my personal backup data in one of its folders. I would recommend encrypting your data before sending it to the cloud, however.

Thanks for your response Steve. I'll stop trying to find a solution and put my my to a different backup option.

Hey everyone, how are you today?

I went through your comments, and I am here to help as much as possible. You mentioned that you've contacted our Support team, right?

If so, would you be able to provide your ticket numbers, just so I can have an idea of all the troubleshooting steps you've followed? 

Thanks, keep me updated!

Good morning, Megan: I assume from your response that you are a Dropbox employee who is able to do something about resolving this issue. Is that a correct assumption?

I was sent a link to a desktop application update by one of the support people with whom I conversed. I’ve installed it, signed out of Dropbox via Accounts, restarted my computer, made sure that "Show setup notifications when new external drives are plugged-in” is selected, plugged in my external drive, which is formatted HFS+ and connected via a USB-C cable, and still it is not recognized. I’ve looked for it from within the desktop app preferences and also opened my account via the website. I've been trying to resolve this issue for 3 days without success. It's been a waste of my time. I'm moving on to looking for other solutions.

Hi Frostinite, thanks for writing back to me, and informing me of this. 

You're correct, and I'd be more than happy to continue looking into this for you, if you want. Provided that you have an active ticket number, have you responded back to it? 

Feel free to send me the number here too if you wish to continue troubleshooting with us. 

The ticket #19482924 I received this yesterday without the issue having been addressed. I replied that I had been very dissatisfied with my experience.