We’re Still Here to Help (Even Over the Holidays!) - find out more here.
Forum Discussion
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://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes
Just confirmed this with DB support (see below). Gutted - been with Dropbox for years and our entire video team flow is based around it 😕
>Hi there, I read today that you are scrapping the ability to store the Dropbox folder on external disks, on OSX. I'd like to ask more about this please.
> Hello Jon, and thank you for contacting Dropbox Support. My name is Joseph, and I will be more than happy to look into your request, right away.
That is correct Jon, as part of the Dropbox for macOS update, the Dropbox folder must be located in ~/Library/CloudStorage.
>This is a showstopper for us, and will mean we have to move to another service. We have a large distributed team using DB for video work, no way it'll fit within internal drives.
Is there a workaround?
> I totally understand and I apologize for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, there is no workaround on this as changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by macOS.
>This change doesn't seem to have hit us yet - we're running a variety of machines inc Ventura
What will trigger its enforcement? Can we stay on an earlier OS or Dropbox version?
>The updates happening automatically every time the Dropbox app is restarting, for example if your device never restarts it should maintain the older version but we can't guarantee full functionality on older versions of the application.
>So what will happen - if we have a Dropbox folder on an 8TB drive and a tiny internal drive - will it try to clone stuff across and eat up the space? What's the mechanism?
>That's right, it will try to move the content on your internal drive until it has no space and gives you an error.
>Is Smartsync still supported? I.e. will it move stuff to being online only if it won't fit?
>It is, however it is now known as online-only.
697 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
Michael C.121 yes that has been shown to not work.
WriterGuy-123 I do believe that solution will likely work, but that one doesn't seem like a common use case. Glad it could work for you.
TheMainOne thank you (though the "woke" comment.. LOL really dude?). Looks like I may give that a shot. I'm also going to evaluate how rock solid they are as a platform. I have had zero data loss on Dropbox.. that's huge for me.What’s wrong with the "woke” comment? He’s totally right, not only Dropbox is a sleazy bunch of Disney type wokes but they also sneak on you data (never felt safe on this front, why on earth would they screen your data lol same way as the GAFAM with the NSA and all that).
Hopefully Elon Musk will buy them back and clean them out from the inside Twitter style.
That said sync.com speed sucks and doesn’t work with my TBs. Lol 2 days for 1.5TB only that’s a deal breaker for me. Sadly no alternative to Dropbox ease of use and speed as of today.Dude - chill out, please! Not sure what's got you all riled up about Dropbox (or Disney, really), but paranoia is NOT a good look... No one cares what's in your Dropbox folders, except maybe people who want to sell you some crap. These days, if you really value total privacy, you've got to live off the grid. So cloud storage should NOT be your first option, right?
Good doggie! Submissive guys like you are the dawn of humanity lol
What a life with your wife that must be...
"you've got to live off the grid"
No critical thinking whatsoever, happy to be enslaved lol smth
"I've been trying out MountainDuck the last couple weeks, and it's working ok, albeit I've gotten a couple (well, a few dozen out of millions of files) errors while trying to sync.
The biggest pain is that I have to re-download everything -- can't seem to get mountainduck to recognize the existing TB of data already local."In my experience using MountainDuck really slows things down. These services slow things down and aren't as good as the native service they're linked to.And yes the re-downloading of 10TB+ of data is not an option, especially since it will be so slow vs. the native cloud service...So it turns out I can sync my external drive in Preferences there's this option 'Manage my backups' > Dropbox Backup Beta and I can easily (apparently, I didn't try yet) sync my hard drive.
Shall I do it?
Will Dropbox remove this feature soon?
Why is it called Backup Beta when you guys say (in this thread) that this feature won't be available on Mac soon? Doesn't make sense.
Meanwhile, I received a notification on my Dropbox app 'The beta experience for macOS is available now - try it' which I didn't accept yet. Is this related to the former? Really doesn't make sense.
Not sure what to do now.
So I turned on the HD Backup Beta feature and my Macbook M1 and it works.
Thanks for the heads-up guys, never used this feature before as I thought it wouldn't work very well. But it does now, so that can be useful. Dropbox really improved the Backup panel with all the disks available and many preferences which didn't exist back in the days. Makes it smooth now.
However I see two potential issues:
1. When I add additional contents (sub-folder and/or files) in the external disk folder, nothing seems to happen. I have to exit and relaunch Dropbox for the Sync to start. Is this normal? Does it wait for a few minutes before syncing? There's no manual 'Sync' button so I see this as a huge annoyance.
2. There's no Green mark in front of the external disk 'Folder' just the same way as it is in the local Dropbox folder. Quite annoying too since you don't really know when a particular external drive folder/file has been finished its sync.
Okay it's been 15 minutes and my external disk Dropbox folder still doesn't update the new content.
Useless then.
Okay so it turns out external storage sync occurs every 60 minutes, and not in real time with like local disks. Fair enough. I didn't know what. That should be more explicit, instead of hiding this important information in the FAQs.
