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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-...
That is cool, the only issue to me is that I work in big teams, and freelance also, so everyone sharing media assets and sessions cannot be required to do that. But yeah, for personal use that is a smart solution, especially for me that always work from my desk. But yeah, if I and ALL of my contacts, team, clients, cannot use dropbox properly, it wont work for anyone, and we all are going to look for alternatives.
But I am REALLY hoping Dropbox will fix it and copy whatever Sync.com was able to achieve.
I think we're all hoping that Dropbox sorts this out but sadly some of us can't just wait for them to let us know on launch day. It's too much of a risk to our business and our teams, so due to the total lack of communication and the generic PR spiel coming out of support I would not hold your breathe.
Me personally, I am jumping ship. I intend to move my Mac guys over by the end of April to sync.com and my PC guys the following 2 months after that. Luckily the PC guys aren't affected like the Mac ones but I am not paying for 2 suppliers. I'm already trialling sync.com and it's not bad. A little bit basic in comparison to what Dropbox is now, and maybe more of what it used to be, a simple streamlined clean and accessible data cloud storage, but I'm ok with that.
fjazzfjazz I'm over it and out of it.
They've had 18 months to resolve this and they haven't. That to me is incompetence and they don't deserve my business any longer than needed.
All this 33 page non-sense thread could be fixed by offering Pro users Google Drive-like Plans (up to 30TB since 2021!) or incremental extensions (eg. 6TB, 9TB, 12TB etc.) to finally fit with our needs in 2023!
If Dropbox finally unlocks their rubbish 3TB (+1TB) limitation I can finally get rid of my external SSD drive, make the most of my maxed out MBP M1 (having an internal 8TB SSD) and when Apple releases a 16TB option later on I will feel better knowing that Dropbox is a non-issue, since I will simply need to update the Pro plan from 9TB to 18TB in due time, with a simple click just like Google Drive is offering.
No more external hard drive sync concern then. Easily fixed: just increase the maxed Pro plans.
And everyone can move on getting things done instead of feeding this annoying thread.
I don't need 32TB, I'm fine with 8TB for now, but Dropbox only offers 3+1 in Pro which is half of it. So that's kinda useless.
At some point I'll need 16TB to get confortable headroom but this can wait a couple years until the prices go down and Apple starts rolling them out.
I never said I needed 32TB.
I'd be happy already this year with a 8TB DB Plan, that'd be a pretty solid improvement to start with. Step by step. Then we have time to increase this treshold later on.
I see no limitation here as Google Drive offers 30TB since 2021 and the rest of the competition offers at least 10TB.
psalcal sure 🙂
By the way 3 TB plan was introduced in 2017, don't you think this is outdated? A well-regarded, agile Silicon Valley tech company not updating their product in 6 years, is this even something we've ever seen before??
As reminder, Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years, though the cost of computers is halved. Same should apply to SSD and Cloud space (more or less, sure other economics factors come to play, but we can't get stuck like this)!
Hahaha thanks for the support bro 🙂
I'm down to Dropbox fixing your disk sync issue too, even though I don't need it so much either 🙂
Good luck to all of us!
Not so simple. Those of us that need file sharing and have big teams and multiple clients, we can't expect everyone to have a 4TB internal harddrive. External drives were, are, and will always be a must to the media industry.
- pollen exactly like that except this is the backbone of the application which makes it even worse that they’ve communicated so little.
They seem to have concentrated on so many ‘new and exciting features’ over the years that they forgot to notice this massive change apparently. And now their customers are going to pay for this, both figuratively and in actuality. Does anybody use paper or sign? The best feature they brought out I thought was send. The rest I don’t personally or the staff use. We have better individual specific tools for those other features.
shinbeth you seem to be missing the point. This isn’t about plans. This is about the fact that Dropbox built its business on the back of media companies, those of us that have large files. Now it seems that us media companies (using media very loosely here) can just suck this change up. It’s not as simple as that. I don’t want to keep localising and de-localising folders all day long. That’s time lost and lost time = lost revenue. Multiply that by the number of staff you may have and that adds up. Who is going to pay for that lost time. I have a specific set of large folders that are always localised. These are my regular and super large folders that are always in use every week. Now imagine I have a 512GB hard drive and my go to folder is 200GB, what do I do? Sync that locally every time I get a job in an then make it offline only afterwards? Ridiculous. If you have an M chip Mac and you only bought a 1TB drive you’re now screwed if you operate in a similar vein as described above. Even older macs are unupgradeable because of Apples desire to keep customers from upgrading their machines themselves.
It’s also not so simple when you have large dropboxes. I am on Business Teams Pro plan or whatever it is and my Dropbox is over 40TB. Nobody makes a 40TB internal drive and who in their right mind would want an internal drive that large anyway. For us larger users the cost of $ to MB is very good value with Dropbox. Google not so much. This is why this is going to be a painful breakup but one that is necessary for my and probably many other businesses. Sadly Dropbox will only do something after there is a mass exodus or maybe they already are working on a fix. Who knows? Nobody, because they don’t communicate. So some of us just can’t risk it, so are moving elsewhere to mitigate that risk. I get your point, thanks for the detailed explanation. The fact that Dropbox is unable to meet Apple's specs speaks volume about the rigidity of both organizations. Tech companies are supposed to be agile and flexible. Except when they're in a position of monopoly like Apple and Dropbox. Which seems to be the case since 10 years ago, and that's why they struggle to be most efficient to deal with this kind of user issues. I guess the tech bubble burst didn't help either and probably a lot of product dev got fired and this issue became the least of their concern. And here we are now, in total shambles.
That said, and I agree it's a slightly different topic, but they should increase the size limit too asap. 3TB is way too small nowadays I think you'll agree to this. Especially since like I said Google Drive + competition offer 10-30TB. That would solve my issue, not yours though, I get that. Hopefully both our issues will be solved. Fingers crossed.
UKD Except that Drobox isn't a monopoly.
This guinea pig has now switched all Dropbox folders over to Sync.com, taken Drop-the-box off my Mac, and so far it's working beautifully on my Mac, and a bit less so on my iPhone and iPad, where the iOS apps are a bit slower at updating all my folders. This is to be expected, since the Mac files are all offline as well, and the iDevice apps are strictly online-only. So for the moment I'm doing all my email on my computer, but I'm hoping that by tomorrow, the apps will be through theurbprocessing things and up-to-date.
UKD Correction to my earlier email, where I reported that my Sync iOS apps hadn’t yet digested all my Terabyte+ worth of Dropbox data. Right after posting about this, I opened my iPad app for Sync and —tada!—the migration was complete and all my folders were 100% operational. Better still, the folders weren’t a jumbled mess, but laid out alphabetically, just as they are offline on my external disk, with PDF files identified by an appropriate icon, ditto for Word and Pages files. My next step will be to activate two-factor login, and then I’ll be sitting pretty.
UKD My entire Dropbox is just under 2T, so it wasn’t too big of a deal to switch over. It took Sync.com under an hour to digest it on my computer, and the iOS apps needed about 24-36 hours. Given the size of your own requirements, I’d say you are wise to take a gradual approach. If you do it in 2T-a-day increments, you should be in good shape.
fjazzfjazz UKD shinbeth To answer your question, if Dropbox solves the problem before May, I might very well return, if only because it’s the de facto industry standard for folder sharing— plus they allow me to back up my entire account on Synology. I don’t plan on closing my Dropbox account for this reason, although I may downsize it.
So, far, however, I’m finding Sync.com perfectly well adapted to my other needs — and their REAL end-to-end encryption makes my sensitive data more secure. So I’ll have to see when the ensuing month brings us.
ArthurPix @fjazzfjazz @shinbeth I don't think I'll go back sadly. I will keep my personal account with them just for sheer convenience and because it's nowhere near as big as my business one but their whole attitude on this has left a nasty taste in my mouth.
If sync.com is just as good and I don't have the constant sucking up of CPU and RAM too from their app then to me it's good to go. My main requests are team sharing facility, being able to use an external drive and the ability to share externally. It seems sync.com has all this for $15 per user per month. Dropbox has increased to $24 per user per month now. So with 9 people I'll be saving just under $1K USD per year.
I am all paid up until September so I shall be keeping it until then but just not renewing.
- Is it possible to point Sync.com at the current external Dropbox folder, so it exists in both until dropbox is switched off, or is that just asking for trouble? I don't want to have to duplicate the (just under) 3Tb I data I have stored in my 'master' dropbox folder, ifI don't have to, as I switch to Sync.com.
Ru 1971 OH NO, YOU DO NOT want to have two services pointed at the same folder. Unless they have safeguards built in, this would be like the hall of mirrors with both services back at each other and eventually choke, possibly mangling your data—or, if you’re a guitarist, think about ear-shredding feedback.
What you CAN do is copy your Dropbox folder onto Sync, which is what I did, so that I’d have a backup in case of unforeseen disaster. Happily, I didn’t need it, and now can safely delete my Dropbox contents. I’ll have to check when my subscription comes up for renewal, so I can downgrade it.
- Totally concur with that. You are setting yourself up for total data loss, so avoid at all costs.
