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Chronosync and Dropbox
New user of Dropbox here. Apologies if this is a stupid question, but is anyone using Chronosync to sync the content of folders in Dropbox with their counterpart folders on external hard drives? Is ...
Thank you so much for your detailed and thorough response. It really helps!!
There are still some issues that I see with making this system work the way that I want for my personal setup.
I suppose my main question is what's really the point of dropbox if I can't trust it to sync properly and backup between my computers and external drives?
I had seen Fab Dupont on Puremix explain his system for dropbox (where he and his team essentially work entirely off of it) but what he didn't explain (and what I'm certain exists) is how all of their projects are stored to external backups as well.
I can see myself employing a system like yours and working off of an external drive which syncs to dropbox whenever it's plugged in to the Mac mini, but I'm not sure how to implement this fully since I only have 500gb internally on that computer. It is always connected to a 1tb data m.2. But will dropbox allow me to store files here? As you said, Dropbox wants to store everything locally. That external drive is plugged in 99% of the time, but it still risks being unplugged I suppose.
Is there a way I could configure my Macmini as like a home base computer with the 1tb m.2 as the local storage, but access the files stored on that m.2 through my MacBook Pro through dropbox? Or even that I could use an external drive between my computers, but chronosync would sync from my MacBook Pro to the dropbox folder which would then be stored locally on the Mac mini's m.2?
It is quite frustrating that Dropbox is configured this way, and I will certainly be writing them an email asking for integration with chronosync, but maybe there's just a better option overall for me? Maybe I should forgo the cloud storage until it's sorted out better and just use external drives with chronosync and back those up to something like backlaze?
What are your thoughts and recommendations?
Again thank you so much for your time and knowledge. This has been driving me truly and utterly nuts, so it's really nice to get some input from someone with experience.
Following this closely as I’m working through this same problem currently… but I think Fab said in the Puremix video he keeps none of it local, trusts Dropbox’s backup strategy only. Interesting.
Hi everyone. Some great news! ChronoSync 11 is about to be released, and according to their website, will finally add NATIVE support for Dropbox. 🙂
"ChronoSync 11 adds cloud support for Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive as well as many other new features."
Not sure of actual release date yet but I'm assuming it's probably pretty close, within the next few months. This is awesome, because it should solve most of the issues stated above with online-only syncing, local storage issues, etc. I'll post in this thread again when ChronoSync 11 is actually released, for anyone following. 🙂rfiorentino how exciting!! Thanks so much for helping us all with this! I'll definitely check out the new Chronosync when it arrives. Meantime, I've actually been having great luck with GoodSync, sync'ing dropbox cloud with local external HDs and NAS. Things are finally looking up! Again- with massive thanks to YOU! 🙏🏻
For those who really want to dive into this, ChronoSync have released version 11 in public beta! You can download it and find out more Here
However, it looks like ChronoSync is using Apple's "file provider" APIs to do this, which is very disappointing and not ideal, because it inherently creates the same problems outlined in the first few comments in this thread.
If using the new File Provider extensions, Apple forces any content that is located in cloud storage, like Dropbox etc, to be downloaded in the background on your hard drive, just like the native Dropbox app does. I was hoping that ChronoSync would get around that by allowing you to DIRECTLY link your Dropbox account to ChronoSync as a "connection target" just like you can with Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage/Backblaze currently. But instead, they're relying on Apple's framework to make the connection between cloud services, presumably because they don't want to have to develop an applet for every cloud provider. ChronoSync does allow you to remove downloaded/uploaded files in the background after it's done syncing using this new file provider framework, which is a nice workaround for the above, but it would still be much more efficient to directly connect the destination service. Dropbox also has not rolled out the file provider capability to all users yet, so for me, I can't test it with ChronoSync because I can't enable the feature in my Dropbox account yet. All very interesting; I'm going to email ChronoSync and ask them if there's a specific reason why they're going this file provider route, and if there's any chance they will implement direct connections to cloud service providers in the future. I'll report here if I get anywhere. 🙂
