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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-...
In my case, my team are engineers, editors, and the clients are producers, companies. They can afford to have their Dropboxes local on their computers as their work is mainly pdfs, email, google docs. Via the browser, they can receive and push files to others. My clients don't need all of their Dropbox synced locally as they are not manipulating the media, just receiving and pushing it forward. Ussually they have a server somewhere, an IT person, and that main computer, server, has a local dropbox of "infinite space" for them to keep everything. But 99% of the users from the client side, have Dropboxes internally.
Now, if you are an editor, engineer, if you need to have hundreds of GB local at a moment's notice, then you are screwed because even if you have 2TB SSD internal drive, and you work with 5+ clients / projects simultaneously, you cannot possibly make that work.
Makes sense? That is why, I suspect, Dropbox/Apple, statistically, don't give a F. Because there isn't enough percentage of their users that will be seriously protesting over this.
fjazzfjazz yes exactly this, the usecase for most people this changes doesn't cause any issues, for anyone with soem large files it's a real problem. one thing I'm not sure about, is this a mac only issue? as I have a PC sat right here next to me, can I just let that 'be drop box' do it all as it currently is? I use a lot of files from the PC anyway, redners and other video file content and the file speed is fine for me with a cat 5 cable straight between is and my mac.
dandid this is a Mac only issue. macOS 12.5 onwards I believe to be specific. See the details/explanation here
Just an FYI, on that page they stated end of May 2023 for rollout of updated Dropbox. We're almost at the end of June and still no actual updated from them. Shocking PR. Reckon at this rate that by the time they do a complete rollout would've been 2 years since Apple made the initial announcement of changes. Well done @dropbox 👍 nice to see you on the ball and at the top of your game.
dandid I recommend NOT sharing your Dropbox folder via Windows Sharing / SMB. I set this up myself, and after using it to add files for the first time had an unexpected mass deletion of files. My clients and I had to restore around 30,000 files. Thankfully, nothing was lost. Apparently everyone's local files were deleted instantly, and then it took however long for machines to re-sync over whatever connections they had at the time. It's not something I want to do again. I had two tickets with Dropbox support, one via email and another via chat (email support is like one exchange per day, and I was impatient.) Chat support told me SMB sharing is not supported. Email support didn't indicate as much, and thought maybe I had a drive error. Either way, it was a real PITA and did not make me look so great with my clients.
