We’re Still Here to Help (Even Over the Holidays!) - find out more here.
Forum Discussion
Jon C.10
3 years agoCollaborator | Level 8
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-...
- 2 years agoHi 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!
UKD
3 years agoExperienced | Level 12
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.
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.
ArthurPix
3 years agoCollaborator | Level 10
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.
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!