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Forum Discussion

Danimach's avatar
Danimach
Explorer | Level 3
3 years ago

External HDD not available in the "Manage Backups" settings

I'm trying to set up a backup for my external 8TB Seagate Hub. The drive is not offered as an option under the "Manage Backups" settings on the desktop app. A USB memory card reader was recognized ...
desktop
Dropbox Backup
Hannah's avatar
Hannah
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
3 years ago

Thanks for that, Danimach.

 

Can we actually reach out to you via email, so we can investigate this further?

Danimach's avatar
Danimach
Explorer | Level 3
3 years ago

Hi again - I'm revisiting this issue with an update and a question.

 

I had already given up on the option of setting my external drive for backup and meanwhile have already uploaded more than 4TB of data to a standard dropbox folder without any syncing capabilities.

 

I was surprised that today when I connected the external drive to my PC, the hard drive backup dialogue was offered from dropbox. It seems that whatever the issue was, it has been resolved.

 

Now it seems that in order to create the backup, I have to start from scratch as far as uploading and syncing.
Is there any possible way to take the data that has already been uploaded and designate it as the synced backup or do I really have no choice but to upload everything again.

The reason I would prefer to use the backup and synced drive option is so that the backup will reflect any changes I make to files on the drive.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Dani

  • Nancy's avatar
    Nancy
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Welcome back, Danimach! Glad to hear the dialog box now appeared. 

     

    Since the desktop app will start backing up your external hard drive, it will also need to sync those files anew along with the rest of your content, I’m afraid.

  • Danimach's avatar
    Danimach
    Explorer | Level 3
    3 years ago

    That's what I figured.

    The content on my external HDD hasn't changed since I uploaded it to dropbox so I was hoping that there was some workaround that would point the backup feature to the files on already uploaded to dropbox to compare the folder structure.

     

    Re-uploading 4TB of data using dropbox backup is going to take a long long time!!! I'm currently at 730GB...

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