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Forum Discussion
Policy changes to new files as online-only with File Provider on MacOS?
I am trying to determine the current policy for when files become online-only on a macOS machine that uses File Provider. As I understand it, using File Provider is optional for now, but may become mandatory in the future.
I have used Dropbox for over a decade, and currently sync a personal account between 2x Windows devices, 2x Macs, 1 iPhone and 1 Android. My account has 255k files in it, so I'm towards the "power user" side. One Mac is my "main" one, and another is my "personal" one. The personal Mac is on macOS 12.7.6. The main Mac is macOS 15.2. This morning, I switched the personal mac to use File Provider to check its behaviour.
In many previous discussions of File Provider, I have seen the official policy "Files added to your Dropbox account from another device or that are shared by another user will default to online-only." However, this does not appear on the main support page: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes , which is listed as updated last Nov 2024. I am curious; is this no longer the official policy, or has this just been rephrased so the behaviour is just implicit?
The (possibly defunct) policy sentence appears in these two places, for example:
- https://www.dropboxforum.com/discussions/101001016/files-and-folders-have-a-cloud-icon/649915
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34657560
Note that on my personal mac, now using File Provider, I have right-clicked on the top-level folder at `~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox` and clicked on "Make available offline". There's some indication that this overrides the (possibly defunct) online-only policy, but what is it? As another sub-question, I use selective sync, as one of my top-level folders in Dropbox contains large asset backups, and I sync it to none of my computers. I am really unclear how this conflicts with the "Make available offline" feature in Finder.
hi there,
If you were to visualize the above as a hierarchy, the point in time when you went into settings, selective sync, and unticked your large assets folders, is right up the top. almost nothing trumps this (there is one thing that does). You've told the dropbox app not inly do you not want to sync that folder but in fact, you don't even want to see it or acknowledge its existence on this computer. I have a colleague who uses this in the most extreme of ways which is, they have two folders at the very top right under the dropbox folder.:
One is called Sync, the other folder is called NoSync. The NoSync folder has been unticked in selective sync (actually, the next level down but that's getting technical) and from there on he rarely interferes with the dropbox app at all. when he's finished a task or project and he doesn't need it to be on his computer anymore he moves it into the NoSync folder which is a complete mirror copy in terms of folder structure but the ones in the NoSync Folder are stored online only.
I do something similar, I have a folder called superseded, also unticked in selective sync. So it's (to me) kind of a safe rubbish bin, I can move a mass of old folders and files into it and watch them disappear as the internet uploads them and then slowly they go.
Now this is not the same as 'Do Not Sync'. This is a somewhat new command that you may find is on some versions of the dropbox app and not others, ie if you change the install location from the default to somewhere else, you wont get this functionality. This one will remove data from your dropbox and back in again (Do Not Sync & Sync to..) even though it lives inside your root dropbox folder. This is super cool, and it can be scripted. If you're interested let me know I can provide some examples.
- Rich
Super User II
is this no longer the official policy, or has this just been rephrased so the behaviour is just implicit?
Pretty sure it's covered by this line:
Some downloaded files won’t display as occupying disk space.
Which basically means some downloaded files will download as online-only.
Sorry, maybe I’m stupid or missing some subtext here, but the word “download” as it’s used here feels intuitively different from how I’m used to it. Could you help me out?
My expectation for a file being “downloaded” is that the bytes of the file are physically on my disk on my machine. If my machine is disconnected from the internet, I should be able to access every file that’s been downloaded. With this definition, a file can’t be both downloaded and online-only. The only exception I could think of would occur in distributed version control that used file locking.
You may be using “downloaded” to mean “queued for downloading but not necessarily downloaded yet”, or “declared as to-download via Selective Sync, but not downloaded for other reasons”. Could you clarify?
- Rich
You're overcomplicating it. Whether downloaded as available offline or online-only, data still needs to be downloaded for the file to be shown on your computer. Whether you're downloading the entire file or just the marker file (in the case of online-only), data is still being downloaded.
