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Forum Discussion
Syncing icons on the files in the Dropbox folder have changed
Hello The Finder Extension Icons indicating whether a file or folder is Online Only or Available Offline are showing up in my Finder, however, the statuses are incorrect. For instance a folder that ...
Yup, it sounds like they are moving to a Google Drive / Box Drive model. The only thing is, those services are much cheaper (in fact, they are free at many universities). There is no longer any point to a Dropbox subscription. Unfortunately I've got almost a year left on my now canceled subscription, and now I'm stuck with a service different from what I purchased. What garbage.
Have I got this right?
Dropbox have awarded themselves the power to DELETE files from my local filesystem, and make them cloud-only, based on some hazy criteria of "if extra space space is required on your hard drive"? So I'm actually paying for Dropbox for the privilege of being made dependent on them by stealth? And the icons actually now mean: "we can take your files hostage at any time unless you keep paying us money"?
This is the message I'm sending to competing cloud services. I hope it seems clear to all you good folks of the community. I've already gotten helpful responses from two of Dropbox's competitors! Here's my message:
To [competing cloud service CEO]:
I and many Dropbox Business users are planning to migrate away from Dropbox due to its sudden kneecapping of its flagship product - specifically, the usefulness of "selective sync" icons. We're wondering if you provide (or can provide) what we just lost.
Business teams need 3 separate icons for fully synced folders - which Dropbox used to have - brilliantly! - but then canceled without logical explanation this summer. Specifically, we need sync icons that show:
1. ALL LOCAL - the fully synced folder has also been completely pushed to the local drive. (This used to be Dropbox's green check icon; now it's annoyingly represented by two types of green check which are functionally the same).2. MIXED - the fully synced folder has some items pushed to local drive, but not all. (This used to be Dropbox's white-ish green check icon, which has been redefined by Dropbox with a useless double-designation as "available". It's essential for organizing/clearing drive space for sync/cloud.)3. ALL CLOUD - the fully synced folder is completely "online-only," and takes up no local drive space. (This used to be Dropbox's Cloud icon, but now you can't tell if a Dropbox folder is all-Cloud .. or might in fact be eating massive amounts of local storage).These three precise icons for fully-synced folders (ALL LOCALIZED; MIXED; ALL CLOUD) are essential for drive management among team members who need rapid local access to large amounts of data for their projects. Without these three designations, sync icons are not useful for Business teams.Does your service provide - or can it be amended to provide - these three designations?yours,Soon-To-Be-Former-Dropbox-Promoter, Business Owner, and social media influencerWhich competitors replied to you? Google Drive is not a viable solution for syncing across multiple machines. So, I think my best option is Box Sync (NOT Box Drive). But I'm not sure if Box is still really maintaining Box Sync. Also, it syncs much more slowly than Dropbox (the reason I switched away from it in the first place). Still, at least it has functional, comprehensible icons.
I've written to all of the ones I can find except Microsoft, which is too big and I'm not psyched to move to. Box.com may not have the icons we need but they are at least looking at the issue, per my latest response from them.
Okay, so far, Sync.com has confirmed that they have 3 different icons for fully synced folders. This is great news - they have what Dropbox killed off. Their icons for synced folders show:
Grey check mark (partially pushed to local storage)
Grey cloud (nothing in local stoage)
Green check mark (completely pushed to local storage)Thanks for updating us. I'm so fed up of once dependable services that get ruined by "improvements". Having to manually reset all my folders to "Make available offline" to be sure of a local copy is extremely annoying, especially since I have no assurance they won't revert to "available to be automatically made online-only" again in the future, given that Dropbox now want to foist that behavior on us by default.
Yes and it's wasteful for Dropbox's servers too - I'm now constantly taking entire projects (terabytes worth) offline and online daily because it's the only way to be sure I have the data I need locally, but also the space I need on my local drive. I'm sure I'm not the only one doing this.
As one user pointed out, the info is available (by right-clicking and seeing if "make offline" and "make online" are both options), but Dropbox is choosing to make it hard to know what's what.
The Sync.com rep is now researching cloud-to-cloud migration possibilities to help all of us move teams over to their company. I will report back.
arigoldfilms It's a little more complicated than that for sync.com, but yes, those are the icons they have and it is really clear where your folders are. Right now you can only sync at the folder level, but they are beta testing file level syncing. They suggested I try it, but right now I've been focused on getting things off Dropbox and available on Sync. (So I don't have to renew my Dropbox account next month.) I do plan to try the beta version later.
I've been pretty happy with Sync so far. It's reasonably fast, I know exactly where everything is, and I can change the status of two or three folders without having ALL the folders change accordingly. (That's been a real problem with Dropbox even before the icon issue showed up.) If you work from the web platform, it's super easy to move things around. Easier I than Dropbox. The real limitation is that you can only sync files, not individual folders. But they won't decide for you that you don't have enough space on your hard drive and start moving things to the cloud without your doing so yourself!! It's a lot easier to control and manage than Dropbox.
One other benefit of Sync for Windows users -- you can open all your files right in Windows. (Password protected files didn't open in Dropbox.)
Rua I'm really confused how this thread got marked as "solved," when clearly the issue is not solved.
Thank you for taking the time to give the response that you did. It is great to have a dropboxer in here willing to dialogue. However, your response did not "solve" this issue. Instead it explained what we all unfortunately already know. Please remove the "solved" status from this thread.
Until something is done to address the selective sync icons having been changed, the issue we are all having is most certainly not solved.
But the true "solve" is simple. We need either one of the following simple fixes:
- 1) The old selective sync icon system back, or
- 2) Simply add 1 more icon to denote if a folder contains a mixture of "online only" and "offline" files.
This whole issue revolves around users no longer knowing if a folder contains a mix of "online only" and "offline" files. That's it. The new selective sync icon system makes Dropbox impossibly hard to use and is literally and utterly debilitating to daily work.
Since this thread won't seem to let votes be cast any more, I created a new idea post, if anyone would like to up vote the idea and try to keep it front of mind for Dropbox.
Holy sh**, they did it again 😂 Your link no longer opens another thread where you can vote for a change, but opens this thread which is wrongfully flagged as solved.
Link in question rusdom
"Since this thread won't seem to let votes be cast any more, I created a new idea post, if anyone would like to up vote the idea and try to keep it front of mind for Dropbox."
