Forum Discussion

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-...
desktop
dropbox business
Mac
  • 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!
Mark's avatar
Mark
Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
3 years ago

Hi iagdotme 

 

So the simplest answer here is 'no'. Due to the changes Apple have made they are no longer allowing this. However, disclaimer here in that is the official supported line. There may be ways of doing so which involve tweaking / changing things BUT these wouldnt be supported by either Apple or Dropbox should something go wrong. At this moment I dont actually know of any, but, I imagine over time some will appear. 

sethares's avatar
sethares
Explorer | Level 4
3 years ago

It appears that Dropbox is being disingenuous by blaming this change on Apple. If it is really true that supporting external drives is no longer possible for cloud services like Dropbox, how is it that some of their competitors can support external hard drives? For example, sync.com has no such restrictions -- you can have your sync folder on any drive/drives you wish. Like many people on this thread, I will need to migrate to another service unless Dropbox restores the ability to have our folders on external drives.

About Apps and Installations

Have a question about a Dropbox app or installation? Reach out to the Dropbox Community and get solutions, help, and advice from members.

The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!