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Dropbox removing external disk support for Mac users
In case anyone's unaware... if you're a Mac user storing your Dropbox on an external drive, you'll shortly lose that ability.
https://talk.tidbits.com/t/dropbox-drops-support-for-storing-files-...
Further exchange with Dropbox support:
Hello, welcome to Dropbox support. How can we help you?
>Hi there, I wanted to confirm something
>Hello there Jon, and thank you for contacting Dropbox support. My name is Jackson, and I will be more than happy to assist you with your issue, right away.
>Hi Jackson.I understand Dropbox going forward will no longer support storing the folder outside of the user directory. This means by default we can't store it on an external drive.
(OSX)
>A bunch of us are discussing this here https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Storage-Space/Disaster-Dropbox-removing-external-disk-support-for-Mac-users/m-p/659876#M10309
>That is true yes it will be under Library/Cloudstorage
>Someone on Reddit has suggested a workaround could be to move your Mac user directory (your home folder) onto an external drive. This would mean that ~/Library/Cloudstorage would be on the external drive.
Can you confirm if this would work?
>From my understanding, you would like to know if moving the whole user folder, would allow the Dropbox folder to be placed on the external drive.
>Correct.
>I am afraid I do not have definitive information about this workaround. The Dropbox folder, and the folders of other cloud services will have to be under that folder. If the folder is on the external drive, reasonably the Dropbox folder would also be located there
>OK so we'll just have to experiment. I have to say given this will mostly affect business users, the fact there's been little notification or suggestion of workarounds (only a note I happened to come across saying that our data would be moved without warning) isn't very professional.
(if you wanted to pass that back)
We shouldn't be having to experiment with hacks, when we use this as a serious tool.
>Ok! I will forward your suggestion to the team. The restriction is set by the macOS
>Thank you.
>And for us to give an official workaround, we have to be 100% sure that it will not cause issues
For instance
Having your Dropbox folder on the external drive is already risky
Since if it fails
There is a chance of file loss
>Perhaps the team could look into the workaround I'm suggesting and check it for ruggedness, and inform the community (e.g. on the link above)? There's a bunch of us paying thousands of pounds/dollars a year looking to jump ship to OneDrive (who have a workaround) or similar, and we REALLY don't want to.
>I will make sure to forward it to them. I know that Onedrive is using a workaround where they symlink the folder to that location
Instead of moving it there
>We use extended version history to mitigate for disconnected external drives btw. It's not practical to store the amount of data we handle on an internal SSD.
And I know lots of other users are the same
We're doing 4-8k video production
>Understood. I will forward your suggestion to them, since the team looks for user suggestions when implementing changes
As per the suggested workaround of moving the Home directory on your Mac to the external hard drive, what would be the cons of such a move?
By using Dropbox our data is by default backed up in the cloud. So we are not worried about an external hard drive failing. We are more concerned about potential permissions issues and performance.
My understanding is that the Home directory just stores files and content, as opposed to Applications - which would still run off the internal hard drive.
"As per the suggested workaround of moving the Home directory on your Mac to the external hard drive, what would be the cons of such a move?"
If the external drive is an HD (spinning rust), then the primarily hit would be indeed be performance. If in addition you're on a laptop - well - you're now tethered to that external drive.
In my case, my external drive is a slow spinning (but reliable) 10TB HD. I'd not want to have all file caches and the like from ~ /Library/ living there. The OS and apps will be hitting that drive constantly. You really want that to be either the internal SSD, or an external thunderbolt SSD. Most of us can't afford a huge SSD though.
Would the Home folder and Library folder be two different things?
Ie., could the Library folder be stored on the internal hard drive, while the Home folder be on the external hard drive?
Businessman994 could try it, but Dropbox traditionally hasn't handled symbolic links well (understatement).
There are also unknown unknowns. Dropbox is a kernel extension, which may or may not handle the fact that /Applications/Dropbox is now not on the same disk as ~/Library/ correctly - depends if they had the foresight to envisage this use case, and how it's coded.
We're going to need to test it - and per my message to DB - ideally THEY should be doing that for us.
