Forum Discussion

DV87's avatar
DV87
Helpful | Level 6
3 years ago

Smart Sync: Option for files I "make available offline" to remain available offline

I used to love Dropbox's Smart Sync feature, but it's gotten very frustrating since it started automatically removing files that it thinks I haven't accessed in a while. I find that it regularly purg...
DV87's avatar
DV87
Helpful | Level 6
3 years ago

I'm running Dropbox v182.4.6427 and MacOS 13.5.2 (Ventura) on a 2023 Mac Studio (M2 Ultra).

I see from the link you provided that upgrading my Dropbox means that my main Dropbox folder will be moved to ~/Library/CloudStorage. Unfortunately, this prohibits me from upgrading Dropbox, as my Mac's internal hard drive is only 2TB, and the amount of Dropbox data that I need to always be accessible offline exceeds that... 

 

While I realize Dropbox has never supported it officially, my solution has always been to use a large, external Thunderbolt drive to store my Dropbox data. This has generally worked well, but it appears this may no longer be possible for Mac users due to restrictions with Apple's File Provider API. So yeah... I see that Apple is the primary source of this issue, and that it also impacts most other cloud storage services.

 

So, since I need offline access to a lot of my Dropbox data and am unwilling to have that data filling up my computer's internal hard drive, I wonder if staying on Dropbox v182.4.6427 and disabling Smart Sync altogether might help resolve the issue (at least for the short term). Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated. Thank you. 

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