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Jon C.10's avatar
Jon C.10
Collaborator | Level 8
3 years ago
Solved

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-...
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  • BenDBX's avatar
    BenDBX
    2 years ago
    Hi Everybody,
     
    We’re excited to share that external drive support for Dropbox for macOS on File Provider is now available for testing as a beta feature. This is available to some users today and will be available to additional users on a rolling basis. In order to be eligible to test this feature, please follow the instructions in this Help Center article. 
     
    Keep in mind that participation in beta programs is subject to the certain terms and conditions. There are certain additional participation requirements:
    • This beta is only available to US-based users
    • You must be on macOS 15 beta
    • You must have an external drive that is APFS formatted and encrypted
     
    Please let me know if you have any further questions!
TRO_Berlin's avatar
TRO_Berlin
Helpful | Level 6
3 years ago

We have a Dropbox Business with unlimited storage and multiple Workstation Macs that need their production-files available offline all the time. It is about 4-5 TB per Workstation that needs to be available offline. Right now we have Thunderbolt RAIDs or internal PCIe RAID Cards (MacPro) with 12-16TB of available storage. Dropbox is configured to be on these external storage devices.

It works perfectly fine right now, but of course we are still running the "old" way of dropbox. We did not get a popup to upgrade to the new version yet.

 

If the new version gets pushed to our workstation, we will have to look for an alternative solution. Blackmagic CloudStore? Linux Server running Dropbox and sharing the folders via SMB on a 10gbit network maybe? OneDrive? 

I am really hoping for an official statement and solution by Dropbox that solves this problem.

beenyweenies's avatar
beenyweenies
Helpful | Level 7
3 years ago

I'm not sure what exactly is going on, but I just checked my Dropbox app (I'm on Ventura 13.4 and Dropbox v178.2.763) and noticed that it had me signed up for the beta version, with a button to leave the beta. When I clicked this, Dropbox reloaded itself and the interface was back to the prior version, INCLUDING the option in the "Sync" tab to change the Dropbox folder location! I set this to my external drive and it worked!

 

So I don't know if DB is intentionally rolling back this mandatory File Provider thing, or if I just got lucky. Either way, it's working!

  • ArthurPix's avatar
    ArthurPix
    Collaborator | Level 10
    3 years ago

    beenyweenies Thanks for your valuable input. It’s encouraging, since it seems to indicate that DropBox might understand our wish to continue installing the program on external drives. If any newcomers have an experience to the contrary — or similar to that of beenyweenies  I’d love to hear about it.

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