How do I turn off the popup asking me to backup an external drive?

[Vorpal]

Every time I plug in an external drive, I get a popup from Dropbox asking if I want to back it up to dropbox.

I will never want to do this, since my external drives are themselves backups.

This occurs even if I check the box "do not ask again"

On the last disk I attached there was a file: .dropbox.device that has both hidden and system attributes set.

If I remove this file, will the popups stop happening.

[Rich · Accepted solution]

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@Vorpal wrote:

On the last disk I attached there was a file: .dropbox.device that has both hidden and system attributes set.

If I remove this file, will the popups stop happening.

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The "Do not ask again" box is specific to the device you've plugged in, and Dropbox writes the .dropbox.device file to be able to identify that specific device and never ask you about it again. It does not prevent Dropbox from asking the question for other drives connect. To do that, you need to disable it in Dropbox Preferences on the Backup tab.

[user1969903]

So let me get this straight. You're telling me that a company worth how much? A few billion $, right? Can't program a way to identify drives other than writing some file on it? You do realize USB devices have a unique serial id, right? It's literally the first hit on stack overflow. But no. Instead, you decided to nag me each time I plug in my device. Most USB drives I use are for installing OSes. I flash ISOs on them and use them as installation media. I don't give a fluke about backing that up. 

You should at least reword the dialog box to something like "Don't ask me again for this device (please note that we were lazy and we are writing a file on the device to identify it next time you plug it in and if you delete that file we will continue to nag you about it)." Perhaps even add another checkbox "Permanently disable this useless feature"?

[Stevemann]

"Perhaps even add another checkbox "Permanently disable this useless feature"?"

I would very much like this as well. But I would change it to:

"Perhaps even add another checkbox "Permanently disable this **bleep**ing, annoying, useless feature"?"