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
Would the Home folder and Library folder be two different things?
Ie., could the Library folder be stored on the internal hard drive, while the Home folder be on the external hard drive?
David, Of course Dropbox could support external drives as they did before today OR other cloud storage solutions continue to do (sync.com, icedrive, pCloud). Lets be clear that this is a design choice by Dropbox.
There are also unknown unknowns. Dropbox is a kernel extension, which may or may not handle the fact that /Applications/Dropbox is now not on the same disk as ~/Library/ correctly - depends if they had the foresight to envisage this use case, and how it's coded.
We're going to need to test it - and per my message to DB - ideally THEY should be doing that for us."Lets be clear that this is a design choice by Dropbox."
I'm not so sure. This previous thread about this (which someone sent me earlier today) implies Apple is slowly forcing all the streaming companies to do this - OneDrive already made the change a year back, and now has a workaround.
Looks like an Apple thing not a Dropbox thing. (Note the mention of Ventura is a red-herring, this affects Monterey too).Businessman994 could try it, but Dropbox traditionally hasn't handled symbolic links well (understatement).
Has anyone got onto Apple about this?
It appears One Drive has developed a work around for this huge problem. See the heading "Using Another Volume" at this link:
Essentially the system drive still has the file aliases in the library folder but you can choose, on initial install, for these items to be synced locally at another location. This doesn't look like a hack, but rather something officially implemented by OneDrive. Unclear what the downsides are...
Insane to me that there has been no outreach from Dropbox about this upcoming change. The service has been such a key component to our workflow for so long. will be unfortunate to have to find an alternative.
This is a terrible move.
If dropbox forces us not to use external drive anymore, I'll simply unsubscribe to dropbox, as will thousands of users.
