Dropbox Location Change on MacOS 12.6

I'd imagine that Dropbox made a decision that the cost of losing the minority of users who have their dropbox folder on an external drive, is less than the cost to support this feature in future versions of Mac OS.

That said, there may be a workaround. You could potentially create a symlink in Mac OS to your external hard drive.

You can either use a command terminal or this app - https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10433/symboliclinker

With the move of Dropbox to Locations my ability to use Sync Folders Pro to copy the contents of Dropbox to an external hard drive suddenly has become a giant pain. The task doing that used to be near instantaneous. Now, it takes forever. I don't understand why.

@benjackson - Your message about robotic responses from Dropbox reps and the refusal to even acknowledge the questions asked is spot on.

I'd been politely ignoring the "updates" for 2-3 months, knowing it "might" be coming, but feeling confident that some methodology would arise to support external drives, despite Apple's changes (symlinks, whatever - just a workaround) Now, of course, the "request to update" is becoming quite annoying, and caused me to look at a thread like this, and realize that Dropbox doesn't even seem to be pursuing this, and the robots seem to mouth "we don't even know why you think this is an issue..."

Glad I finally looked to see what the real situation is, before Dec 30 when my paid for subscription renews, or actually will NOT renew now.

Thanks for fighting the good fight, as it at least informs me and others to move on.

I couldn't agree more! I really liked Dropbox but they have just laid a massive EGG of **bleep**ing **bleep**E! I could SCREAM. F***! I have literally wasted hours with this. And why is the Dropbox Folder now going in the Library Folder? This seems VERY invasive, I always thought that Folder is reserved for Mac System and should be left well alone! Not even iCloud Folder is in there. And why is the folder now dated 1. January 1970. Now I can't even delete that Folder from my Mac, if I want to stop using the DB app. I use Monterey and won't be moving to Ventura for a very long while. Glad I haven't upgraded. Shame. Also, I NEVER set up or asked for 2-Factor Authentification. Now when I try and log in via browser it takes 40min for the 6-digit code to arrive. Jesus f... Christ. This is pure vandalism.

Hi Hikejo,

I'm just wondering how you got Sync Folders Pro to work?

All I want to do is copy stuff out of dropbox onto my desktop, but I end up going around in circles trying to give Sync Folders Pro Full Disk Access.

As a 40 year I/T professional (yes, I apologize for my credentials, but you wanted "someone to correct you"), the concepts are about yin/yang.
If you want to require something within your own O/S - you risk having others say "screw you" and not support your O/S.

If you get to be a big enough dog (Windows/Mac/Linux), then you bite the other dog that might say "screw you".

The bigger dog controls the smaller dog. It is not up to the bigger dog to "fix things" anymore, they don't care.

It is up to the smaller dog to find ways to make themselves continue to work - or then they die.

Though this is software, this is the way the world has always worked.

I agree - this is not a good user experience at all. I upgraded to macOS Ventura about a week after it was released and am currently running Ventura 13.1. I'm also running the latest stable release of the Dropbox app (v163.4.5456) thanks to the auto-update. However, my Dropbox folder is still located in its previous location, in my '/Users/<username>' folder. I only became aware of this forced relocation of the Dropbox folder earlier today, when I was updating my Wife's MacBook after a couple of weeks of no usage and I saw the Dropbox dialog saying her folder was being relocated to the new default location.

I don't like the lack of communication about this issue, both from Dropbox and Apple. I also don't like the non-deterministic approach of the gradual rollout. I'm running the same version of macOS and Dropbox as my wife, but my Dropbox folder has not yet been relocated, and I don't know when to expect that to happen. I also noticed that my Wife now has some spurious notifications about "updated" files in her Dropbox activity list, all timestamped today at the time her folder was automatically relocated. That kind of thing makes me nervous, when important files are marked as "edited" when they haven't actually been changed (at least not by the user!).

This whole thing leaves a bad smell. I'm not happy about it, even though I can just about fit everything I need from Dropbox into my internal HDD with the use of the online-only option for things I don't need regularly. I'd like to see Dropbox take ownership of this issue, share some clear comms, address the specific questions already asked, and look into the phased approach to relocating everyone's Dropbox folder which is creating more confusion...

What is not clear to me is whether or not Apple is actually forcing Dropbox to move.  They (Dropbox support) have not provided a reference.  It would seem other apps have not yet moved everything to /Library.