Re: MacOS 13.0 Ventura, and Dropbox follows OneDrive in forcing the folder on the system drive

Hey LvH, thanks for posting on our Community and providing your thoughts on this. Your feedback has been noted in our system. 

It seems that you haven't opted in the beta for Mac OS users, so you haven't received this update yet on your device. 

If you’re interested in joining our private beta, you can turn on early releases while you can also keep up to date with what is supported on macOS 12 and higher by viewing this article.

The updated Dropbox for macOS app has been developed to adhere to the requirement as set out by Apple therefore this update was introduced to ensure the best possible experience for our Mac users long into the future.

I hope this information helps and please let us know if you have anything else to add or ask. 

So is the ability to move your dropbox folder to an external drive going to be added in a future version or is this function going to be completely removed.  If so, I am going to cancel my subscription.  My primary boot drive doesn't have enough space for my dropbox folder so I need it on an external drive.  Please let me know if this is not going to be a supported function, so I can find an alternative to dropbox that does support external drives.

Same here, I was about to introduce this to our business and now i read this.

Is there any fix to it?

I cloned my internal drive onto a 4TB NVMe drive I stuck inside a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure and set it as the startup drive. It was over 500€ Burt still far less than returning the current Mac for a discount on a new one with a larger internal drive. It works, I can now have everything in the intended folders as per the official apis, which really means I don’t really get to decide that everything stays there, as it’s the system now that decides that based on its inscrutable evaluations. That’s not just Dropbox, that’s every cloud service on macOS from now (Ventura) on.

Thats a solution to make external drives work.

For us, moving DB to external drive was so that relative (user) paths become absolute (volume) paths.

Any workaround for that? Are you using DB by yourself?

Yes, I don' use in collaboration. Absolute paths don't seem likely, unless Apple is willing to relax their API I'm afraid.

Anyone know how this can be raised with Apple? Sounds like we need to put pressure on them.

You should be able to fix all these issues with a symlink.

Create a symlink as described in this article - https://tommcfarlin.com/new-dropbox/

You can use this app if you don't want to use the terminal - https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10433/symboliclinker

You can set the folder to wherever you want, external drive, etc.

symlink won't fix this issue

in third party applications (e.g. adobe) it's following the file back to its actual path.

thats why third party sync clients (e.g. maestral or mountainduck) are not working either.

afaik they use symlinks, too.

it'll always be where the file is located / cached.

so far only google drive worked to not link to the cache location but its also different technology and i don't know if it has changed since the enforcement of the cloudstorage.

I'm not following how a symlink won't work. The actual path will be wherever you previously stored your Dropbox folder.

For example, if your Dropbox folder was previously on an external hard drive - e.g.

/MySSD/Dropbox

You would then create a symbolic link to that folder, and put it in:

/Users/{username}/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox 

The actual path is identical to your previous location. It's Dropbox that will use the symlink.

just tested this in photoshop and illustrator – when created in terminal (not as an alias), it does work.

this is new, this hasn't worked in previous versions. thanks for the note.

Hey there, all.

I too am a deeply disappointed Mac/Adobe/Dropbox user and consultant for a few magazines, printers, agencies, etc.

I hate the loss of selective sync files downloading automatically when InDesign calls for offline linked files, and I hate the loss of the ability to move the Dropbox folder outside the Library folder. And I hate having to freeze updates to 12.2 indefinitely to maintain the current functions.

I have only one suggestion to those in need of an absolute path for multiple adobe/dropbox users.

If you used the Users/Shared folder before to make absolute paths, it occurs to me that the same function could possibly be replicated if the User's Home folders were all named the same.

Instead of Bob, Sally and Tom having custom user folder names, they could all use a home folder named "Design" or something generic like that.

Not ideal, and the logistics of creating a new user folder for each person and migrating everything (or just renaming the user folder - which could be problematic) would be a chore. But it could solve that particular problem if you think about it. And once it's done, there really is no downside to the loss of a home folder with your name on it. Unless that Mac is shared with multiple users who each need a unique home folder I guess. But that seems like a rare scenario.

If they all have the same user folder name, then the path is absolute (right down to the library). Just like when it was in Shared.

Maybe you all thought of this and decided it was not worth the hassle or that users would be unwilling, but I thought I'd throw that out there.

Meanwhile, I have to consider buying a 8TB SSD Macbook for many thousands more just to compensate for this hot mess.

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discofuel wrote:

I'm not following how a symlink won't work. The actual path will be wherever you previously stored your Dropbox folder.

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This won't work now. Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to sync what is on the other side of the symlink. Dropbox now syncs only the symlink itself. This is actually the correct behavior (and the lack of this correct behavior, until now, is why I haven't used Dropbox for the last decade), but in this case, the correct behavior, unfortunately, denies us a workaround to the newly introduced problematic limitation under discussion.

I'm not talking about Dropbox following symlinks within the dropbox folder; I'm talking about the Dropbox folder itself being a symlink. Dropbox won't even know it's a symlink.

@discofuel so you are running on the latest Dropbox Version on macOS with Apples File Provider API and you have SymLinked your ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox Folder from your system drive to a different location (external drive?)?

In which order did you do your steps to make this work? We have 30 TB of files in our business dropbox, so the process has to be efficient 😄 Did you create the SymLink before clicking through Dropbox's Assistant on "migrating" to the new FileProvider API behaviour? Or did you perform the migration to the new Folder, and then "moved its content back" and created the symlink?

We have external Thunderbolt RAIDs with our Dropbox Folders on right now, so we need a solution for this... the alternative would be moving the home Folder, but our RAIDs are HDD RAIDs, no SSD... not sure how that will perform

>>>>Meanwhile, I have to consider buying a 8TB SSD Macbook for many thousands more just to compensate for this hot mess.<<<<

I have sat here for the last two days now trying to BUDGET A NEW MACBOOK PRO from Apple just in order to accommodate this mess. What a mess!!!!

Okay i just checked with a new Installation of GoogleDrive (also Using the new Apple File Provider API), and i tried to put a SimLink in ~/Library/CloudStorage pointing to a Folder on my External Storage. Does not work, only Errors when it tries to start syncing. I guess macOS recognizes the SymLink, the Content of the CloudStorage Folder is managed by the OS.

I guess the only working Solution would be moving the Home Directory to the external storage... this is a huge mess and so bad

THIS is why I've been reading through all of the messages here. I kept thinking why not put an Alias or Symlink back in the Home directory? It could solve all the problems with expected paths. I'm a developer and keep all of my active projects on Dropbox. No, I'm not going to change all of the paths for my various projects. Ridiculous! Why doesn't the Dropbox installer perform this Symlink? I might stop saying no to the new version now. THANK YOU

I've been following this thread for months. Checking back at random to see if there are any fixes.

It's beginning to seem like there is a workaround now? Although I am confused what it is... I am seeing some people mention symlinks (although surely something this simple would have been thought of at the beginning of this 'upgrade'?)

And others talking about moving your whole home folder... which seems plausible if you have a big SSD. Although I'd be afraid of what happens if you unplug the ssd by mistake - will the computer explode into dust or will it just require plugging back in and everything carries on?

In either case, symlink or moving home folders - can someone give instructions on how to do them?

Thanks