Dropbox removing external disk support for Mac users

Did you try it? If so, what do you feel is the downside here? 

Cheers 

I've had to downgrade my Dropbox from the Beta because apparently it was stuck. So just gotta keep waiting for them to sort their sh*t out I guess.

That doing Dropbox sync via Synology is a super long winded way of doing it. Not that it's wrong but more the fact as to why the hell should you have to do that.

I already sync my Dropbox with a Synology NAS so I have a local backup but I don't want all my team to either VPN in to the NAS or do something like that with the Synology app.

Everything about this change is so disappointing. From the lack of communication with us, the paying customer, the lack of detail of what's happening too. Surely somebody must've looked at who their customers are and gone, hey, you know, this is quite a big change, maybe we should speak to the industry and see what they say. It seems the level of arrogance is astounding.

Got it, thanks. Makes sense. Maybe arrogance could also be "not having their **bleep** together". But either way. Yeah, it's been almost a month and not having an official statement with something specific from dbox_ is a super concern, as this is a deal breaker for many of their users. 

fjazzfjazz a month? More like it took them well over 6 months to address that there was going to be a change, and then 6 months to say that the change is delayed, to then say it's coming late November, to then radio silence until this year, saying February if I'm not mistaken and now nothing, except for what people like us have extracted from them, to say if I'm not wrong, May now. I'm pretty sure if you looked up how many press releases / announcements they've made about this "upgrade" I think you'll find there's a total of 3, maybe 4 tops.

The whole thing has been a debacle, yet they keep on pumping out those crappy new features that nobody asked for. If they took the resources they used doing that and put it in to updating their core software then maybe, just maybe, we'd all be happier than we currently are.

I'm actually fine with Apple's new computer types — especially the Mac Mini M2 Pro, which I'm thinking of buying for my wife—but the advantages offered by this new Mac, and by my Mac M1 Studio Ultra, all go away if I have to spend thousands of dollars for internal storage. I've been super happy with my OWC 2T ultrafast Thunderblade, but I bought this explicitly to house my Dropbox and OneDrive folders. When OneDrive deprecated external storage I thought, well, that's Microsoft —and it appears that OneDrive also corrupted ALL MY PDF FILES 😤--but at least I still have Dropbox! So I proceeded to migrate all my OneDrive folders to my Synology NAS, and upgraded my Dropbox account.

Now that Dropbox wants to deprecate external storage as well, I've decided to find an all-around better cloud storage service. There are plenty out there and I've read some good words about Sync, both here and in online reviews. But before I go through all the mishegaas of switching all my devices (seven at last count) from one service to another, I need to know if Sync — or any cloud storage service, for that matter—has actually committed in public to supporting external drives.

Does anyone know of such a chimera, or am I crazy just to hope one exists?

UKD very well said indeed. I see now why you're ranked level 9!

ArthurPix I'm with you here totally. I haven't updated any of my teams Macs because of what Dropbox is doing. Plus with all the change moving over to M chips it's been a bit daunting as to what to go for. To upgrade to a 4TB Apple drive on a base Mac Studio is a £1,200 upgrade against the cost of the whole machine with 512GB storage of £1,999. That's just greedy.

The biggest problems have been the shear cost of internal storage by Apple and obviously this API change they implemented that seems to be stopping Dropbox (and maybe others?) from storing cloud storage like this on external drives. Who knows if this is an Apple ploy to extract even more revenue out of their professional customers or whether it's laziness by the developers at Dropbox, OR that the cost of implementing an external storage system that will talk with Apple's API is far too costly.

I think what grates me the most is the complete lack of communication. We have bloody paid for this and yet we seem to be the last ones to know about what's going on.

The question is as you say though, is there anyone out there that does offer an external storage version of their cloud service and if so do they intend to move to an internal storage only solution because of the new (not new now) API filing structure. So frustrating and time consuming.

I just wish a company could be honest about what's happened and is going on and what can and can't be done.

The problem is both Apple and Microsoft own their OS's and cloud solutions. Any 3rd party Sync software using these platforms will always struggle to fully integrate or will need to work around any changes, especially if Apple/Microsoft quote it's a security requirement.

Long term the outlook for Dropbox and others including Google Drive looks bleak unless a regulatory measure is put in place to assist or if Open source Linux desktop takes off in a big way.

Bluebicycle This is ingenious and I have just enough Synology chops to MAYBE make it happen between my NAS and my external drive. But OMG the things that could go wrong! I don't have enough Synology chops to be confident that I'll always get it right, and I don't have as much faith in my knowledge of Cloud Sync as I do in handling Dropbox directly.

Bottom Line: I simply can't entrust my data to this solution. It would be much easier to switch cloud services, if only I could find one that I trust to keep supporting external drives.

What!?  I don't know how I didn't hear about this disaster until now! After using Dropbox for nearly two decades on external drives with no issues, THIS makes Dropbox entirely useless for me. Apple doesn't even MAKE internal hard drives big enough to support this change.

PLEASE Dropbox find a solution to this ASAP. If not, it's goodbye.