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Forum Discussion
Changing where Dropbox syncs files on Mac OS
I’m a photographer with about 4TB of images that reside on an external WD Elements drive. I access these files from Lightroom to organize them and edit them. My original storage and backup plan when I had far fewer images was to have these same files stored on my computer (I would manually copy the files from the external drive onto the computer - a laptop but now a Mac Studio). The files on the Mac Studio were synced with Dropbox, and my desktop Dropbox app lives on my Studio.
As I ran out of storage space on the Mac Studio I had to stop the automatic syncing of my files to Dropbox and now my Dropbox directory on the Mac Studio is all on-line only. (I’m not a Dropbox expert so I may not have these terms right.)
My workflow is clearly a mess. I basically have two identical sets of files, one in my external drive and in Dropbox on-line, but they are not connected. Im worried about losing the link between my images and my Lightroom catalog.
I’m hesitant to fix this without some good advice. I’m thinking I may need to move my Dropbox directory from my Mac Studio to my external drive, and then start syncing the 4TB of files on my external drive with Dropbox, and then delete the duplicate files that are currently in Dropbox.
Does that seem to be the best approach?
6 Replies
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- Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hi Sophf, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
What OS version are you currently running on your machine?
Depending on this, it might not be possible to move your Dropbox folder to the external drive due to the recent changes with Mac OS.
This will help me to assist further!
- Thanks, Jay. I’m on Sonoma 14.1
- Jay
According to the Dropbox desktop application in the preferences, where is the current location of your Dropbox folder?
- In Finder it is shown as Macintosh HD > Users > {my user name} > Dropbox
In Dropbox Preferences it is shown as being in {my user name} as well. - Jay
Have you already tried moving the Dropbox folder by following these steps?
Bear in mind that, in the future, with the recent changes to File Provider, the desktop app might revert to having your Dropbox folder located on your computer itself.
- Given the changes with file provider, I will probably just continue on the path I’m on. Thanks for helping me think it through
