Dropbox removing external disk support for Mac users

ms25 we shall see.  Sync has said they have no plans to stop supporting external drives.  Also Sync just released a new update which reportedly offers much increased speed.  I don't even care about integration with the OS as much as I care about support for external drives.  

A big issue for me is that most of my clients are Dropbox users with huge, unlimited accounts. They share folders which I add to my Dropbox to be synced locally. Sometimes those folders are huge. So it isn't just up to me to change services on my own machines... I'd need to convince some rather large corporations to do so as well.

ms25 I hear you, and many of us are in the same boat. But until Dropbox tells us they have a solution, we are all on borrowed time.

ms25 Honestly I would not believe or trust anything that comes out of Dropbox's mouth these days sadly. If I'm not mistaken the new and finished version of the new Dropbox was supposed to be out in April. Where are we now? June! This was also supposed to have been completed last November. Where are we now? June the following year.

Dropbox has considered this thread as "closed" but yet for some reason it's on 54 pages now is it? They seem to drop in very now and again to dispel something and then state that they're "working on it" and that it's in beta and nearly finished. We'll be getting this in April. Where are we again? Oh yeah, JUNE.

So this is my advice to anyone who has large amounts of data on an external drive and a small internal drive. Avoid Dropbox. Find someone else who will listen to you, help you and whose businesses practices enhance your business needs. This USED TO BE Dropbox but now they're just your usual money grabbing behemoth who don't listen to their customers, don't communicate with their customers and actually look down on their customers. I mean HOW DARE WE COMPLAIN about a product that is no longer fit for purpose. I mean we only PAID money for it. 

Personally I am still in the process of moving my files. Sync DOT com is slower but comes with encryption and whilst I have seen that they have provided an update I am actually running on their beta because that has the SyncCloud feature that we have with Dropbox and need. I don't know if they've  updated their beta as yet or if the latest build has that feature available as a full blooded feature now.

So the no. 1 rule is PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS. Don't get caught off guard and do whatever you need to do. There are plenty of options out there and you just need to find one that fits your needs. Maybe even move it all on to a NAS and run that as your own cloud. 

UKD Well said, and if Synology were a bit easier to use, I might go with that option, since Apple APIs are unlikely to affect it. Drives are steadily getting cheaper and my current NAS has plenty of space to accommodate my needs, with dual redundancy. Then I might use Dropbox simply to back up my private cloud instead of vice versa.

ArthurPix Synology's Drive is now really simple. They've improved it so much vs what is what a couple of years ago. It's mega fast to sync and the only limitation is your own internet speed and capacity. Had I known how much they had improved all this and their simplicity in both setting it up and syncing across Synology NAS's I probably wouldn't have bothered with using a 3rd party company. I may decide next year to not even bother and use my own NAS's. 

I have 2 x NAS's now. 1 sits under my desk in the UK and is a clone of my Dropbox which is about 27.9TB from 34.9TB capacity and for which part of it is now an archive system. And the 2nd one is a clone of what I have on sync DOT com and that is currently at about 2.46TB from 25.47TB.  That one sits in a server room Singapore. The 1st NAS is maxed out with all the drive slots filled so that's limited but as it's an archive now it's fine. The 2nd one is a new 8-bay and I have 6-bays left so there should loads of capacity for the future.

I have been super paranoid and did get my dropbox hacked once before. That's why I have clones or if you wanna be IT about it, backups, of everything. You only lose your data once. I've also, due to the hack, gone a bit mental with all my passwords. Now they're at something like 24 mixed letters and characters and symbols.

The thing with NAS's though is if you don't know how to set it up properly or are limited in funds then NAS's can seem expensive vs cloud storage but when you add it up YoY the costs are actually very reasonable. Major downside is the self maintenance and management of them.

psalcalThe longer they leave us to twist in the wind, the more I’m coming round to your ultra-skeptical way of thinking. The bigger the corporation gets the less they listen to us users. Doubtless this is why smaller providers such as Sync and pCloud DO listen.

But I have a question to pose for everyone who says they can’t leave Dropbox because they have clients with huge unlimited accounts, viz, What are THEY doing with their Dropbox folders? Or are they all on PCs? 

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. 

UKD I'm in a similar situation as fjazzfjazz . My clients use Dropbox, taking the decision to use it or some other service mostly out of my hands. Other than this (HUGE ISSUE) I've been mostly happy with Dropbox. I feel like I've taken a pretty deep dive into this issue now, mostly so that I can have some informed discussions with my client's IT people about it. I don't really know how other services plan to avoid this Apple/MacOS limitation in the future, when the old kernel extensions are truly obsolete. It seems like a roll of the dice any way you slice it. Best of luck to us all.

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.