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Forum Discussion
No dialog box when connecting external HD?
I want to back up my external HD to my Dropbox account.
What should happen: When I connect the external drive, I should get a popup that asks if I want to back up the external drive, I select i...
Hi @Jay,
Thank you for the response.
I ended up deleting my entire drive (backing it up on another first of course), and erasing it fully.
Upon doing this I got the dialog box again, and I just checked it right away.
So, that is good; but I still have a couple issues/questions:
1) What steps do I need to take to find the .dbxignore and .dropbox.device files on the root folder of the external drive (I'm using a macbook pro on OS Big Sur) ?
I want to do this for another drive also and I wasn't able to locate or un-hide them successfully, hence why I just erased the drive. I'd like to not have to do this again for another drive.
2) How do I get the dialog box back that let's me select & un-select folders to sync on my external drive?
I came the first time and now I can't get it again. I actually only want to back up part of my external hard drive, and not the whole thing. But, because I started backing it up on Dropbox and now I'm re-populating my data on the drive, Dropbox is syncing the whole thing. When I unplug and re-plug in the drive it gives me a dialog box that just says "dropbox will continue syncing your drive". I actually want to dialog box where I get to choose what folders sync and which ones do-not, like I can access through the preferences for my actual Macbook. How can I get that dialog box to come up or force it myself? I have too much data on the hard drive for the dropbox account, so I just want to put some things on but that is not currently possible.
If I ever want to change which folders sync from the hard drive in the future too it seems that there is no way to access this, which is making me question how good of a solution Dropbox can be for the external drive scenario.
What I (and it seems like a lot of others) need and/or are looking for is some equivalent to the "Manage backup" functionality for externals drives too. Because it's not something that you set once and never touch again, it's something you need to manage.
Thank you for any help.
Great post from xuser06
I hope/pray an actual developer or product designer reads this post/thread.
Appreciate Dropbox support team but this is going in circles and obviously is a design oversight on a new feature that we are all eager to use but was rolled out half baked.
I hope/pray an actual developer or product designer reads this post/thread.
Appreciate Dropbox support team but this is going in circles and obviously is a design oversight on a new feature that we are all eager to use but was rolled out half baked.
Same issue for me here no dialog pop up. I dismissed the dialog the first time it came up, but I do want to set this up now, and be able to configure it whenever I want. So far looks like the support/communication here has been POOR. We deserve better.
- My external HD meets all the requirements (HFS+)
- Dropbox app reinstalled
- Back up preferences set correctly
- No ignore files in the root of my external HD
- More than enough space on my account
Why has there been no comprehensive answer on this yet? Why no work around or indication this is a bug , or something that's being worked on?
- Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
The file should be visible in Finder, so you can delete it from there.
If you're not able to do so, please let me know more details on what you're experiencing.Hi guys some new info provided to me direct by support.
They claim:
"your external drive's usage is 825.5 GB. Please note that, currently external drives on Mac computers with more than 256 GB of usage, are not able to be backed up."
I'm not sure why dropbox was prompting me first when I first connected my drive. They also claim:
"The External Drive backup feature, allows you to back up an external hard drive directly to your Dropbox account on dropbox.com.
Please note that, the external Drive backup will be uploaded, to a folder named “[Name of your external drive]”.
So it will be uploaded as a whole and you will not have to choose which folders to backup.The option you are referring to, can only be performed by the Computer Backup feature and not the External Drive backup.
"
This is odd because when I went to click through the options when I first saw the popup, I am almost certain it asked me which folders I wanted to back up from my external drive. Can anyone else confirm whether the external drive back up option allows you to select specific folders or not? Thanks
Seriously Dropbox, is that true – "currently external drives on Mac computers with more than 256 GB of usage, are not able to be backed up."
There's no mention of that anywhere, only that we should use an out of date disk format, and my external drive is 2TB.
I've been an advocate of Dropbox since the early days but this whole experience with the external drive backup functionality has been uncharacteristically shoddy. Please get it fit for purpose asap.
