Dropbox removing external disk support for Mac users

@shinbeth KyleKoch yes, can I just echo comments, in the desperate hope that DB are monitoring the thread and will manage our expectations on this proportionally.

We are part of huge enterprise team subscription- many petabytes, perhaps our part of that operation has 100TB. Although not specifically designed for the task, we work entirely out of Dropbox Sync, to identical named external volumes, for video editing and collaboration. We simply sync the folder we need for the week and maintain a number of other folders for generic assets. Dropbox is our Asset Manager!

It's not about drive speed, it's not about capacity per se, it's about headroom. We need at least 10TB of overhead, to effectively selectively sync and bring offline (stupid word they should have left it as "local") media assets.

When done we simply let it go. Space is effectively infinite in the Cloud, although we do archive and manage it periodically. It's a profoundly efficient workflow, that will eventually overtake on-site location monolithic media servers, for content production.

One issue is that the local caches do not empty, for up to 3 days after making files "online" only. There is a procedure for deleting this, to clear space, it's a safeguard for when files may not have been uploaded, but works against our workflow. I'd like an undo feature plus a way of space being immediately released. Even more reason for extra storage headroom. You do not want to accidentally unhitch the wrong material, because you are running out of local storage!

There's a lot of binary and uninformed traffic on this thread, about Dropbox generally, and red herrings about speed, that are either irrelevant, or just not true. It works, it's efficient, the LAN share feature is astonishing, for locally sharing assets, without recourse to the cloud. The whole thing gives us distributed resilience across a number of Macs, with access anywhere in the world. That is big deal.

We have to be able to continue to sync to external volumes. Apple have depreciated an API, this is what they do, they have their reasons and unfortunately it's on Dropbox to work out a solution, to maintain the service. Otherwise it becomes useless for us.

I'll just add that, if you have a decent cabled internet and sync only a small number of folders in Preferences and then selectively sync beyond, the operation is flawless. Dropbox is very good indeed.