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

[Emanuele B.]

With Monterey, OneDrive implemented the new apis from Apple for online syncing that demanded its main location be a specific folder on the system drive. 8 months later, the MacOS community section of their site is a collection of anger, accounts of giving up on the platform entirely, praise for Dropbox for not going the same way.

Except it just did, it only waited until Ventura, and now my 360GB Dropbox home folder is supposed to fit on a drive that has about 160GB available, and I guess it was Apple's fault all along, but this is still a major malus to my having any use for Dropbox, I want a full hard copy of my files on local and not having to download them on the fly. This is a bummer.

[Megan]

Hi @Emanuele B., thanks for reaching out about this.

Thank you for your feedback.

As with any operating system, macOS is updated regularly and with that we must keep the Dropbox desktop app aligned with any requirements set out by an OS.

Keeping aligned to those requirements ensures that the Dropbox desktop app will provide the best possible experience for all our customers in to the future.

We’ll be sure to pass your feedback along to our Product team.

Thank you.

[Emanuele B.]

Hello, and thanks for replying.

Keeping aligned will ensure the continued existence of Dropbox on macOS, but as for the “best possible experience”, I mean yes, emphasis on “possible” as in “the one that is allowed to be”, and i realize Dropbox had limited pushback in this or we wouldn’t be in this situation, but I tell you, I will not spend thousands of euros to get a Mac with a larger internal drive just so i can run the cloud service that I’m already paying for fully local. 

This is going to end in tears for a lot of people.

[davidarden]

Any chance you can elaborate here? I'm on the latest version of Monterey. I only care about one subfolder (approx 80gbs) to be 100% offline. All the others can stay off my device unless specifically called upon. That's how dropbox is operating currently. Would this change if I upgraded to ventura?

[Emanuele B.]

I don’t know, do you have enough space on the system drive to hold these 80GBs and more? Because while I assume the client will keep having an option to designate files and folders as always available offline, the fact of the matter is that the cloud management API of macOS will have the last say and may offload some files to the cloud to make room for others if it deems it necessary, and if the experience with OneDrive which Microsoft adapted to this API already with Monterey is anything to go by, control over one’s files will become an uncertain thing at best. I just have a Windows machine to keep a local copy on both cloud services, because it’s clear Apple is so sold on the idea of files on-demand that they won’t let you have it on their systems.

[davidarden]

Ahhh, understood. This is very helpful! Yeah I've never liked how iCloud handled offline storage. You seem to abdicating a great amount of control to Apple. Shame essentially all cloud storage systems will have to fold into this system. Appreciate the help, brother.

[dom burgess]

This is an AWFUL idea. I work for a media company of nearly 100 people, all using Dropbox.  We have a giant Dropbox of about 100TB (yes, TB...not a typo). Due to the large file sizes we use, we HAVE to use external drives and this change makes Dropbox unusable for us. I highly suspect we will be moving to a different service. 

After all the money we've given Dropbox, this is a huge disappointment. 

[BJRo]

Dropbox was synching fine, and then I opted to relink it after moving it. Now Dropbox wants to store 100+GB in my Library folder? What the f? Anyone have a fix to this?

[Emanuele B.]

No fix, sorry, even if they were to allow a different folder it would really only be symlinks to the Library folder. 

[treeandrew]

Hi All,

Now I am replying to this thread, but with a caveat of "I haven't tried this yet", and I'm even a little hesitant to try it myself - but I probably will - and it is consistent with (I think) both a) Apple's preferred arrangements, and b) Dropbox's compliance with Apple's approach / APIs.

Firstly, let me say my current Dropbox installation is working, and is on an external, non-System Drive, and contains a very large number of "local" documents - well over 1 TB. So given I have a 512 GB iMac, clearly, it's been impossible to host the Dropbox folder on the System Drive for some time.

But also, my User's Home Directory itself has been getting problematically large for some time - as I'm sure many with a space constrained Mac will recognize. So, my suggestion is in two parts. The first of which is certainly not for the faint hearted. You can move your User's Home Directory to an second drive - and on a laptop, even to an external drive - as dangerous as that sounds - because obviously, you'll ALWAYS need that external drive attached to log in as that user ... AND that drive MUST be a very fast drive ... Don't use a spinning HDD, it must be SSD for reasonable performance.

I won't clog up this post with the details of doing this - which aren't trivial, and there's a few gotchas along the way - such as make sure you create a second Admin level user on your machine, just in case you were ever caught in a situation where your external drive couldn't be attached, and you needed to do something with Admin privileges. The following link contains a pretty good roadmap of how to do it. move-macs-home-folder-new-location-2260157

Having done that, the location of where Dropbox should offer to place your Dropbox folder should be - I hope - ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox - which - and this is the bit I haven't tested yet - should be under your newly re-located Home Profile Directory, on the - remember my earlier very strong recommendation, very fast external SSD you're using for it.

Once again, I can't emphasise enough, this is at this stage a theoretical solution to this issue at this stage - I haven't tried it, but I'm strongly considering it, because, I came to the forum looking for an answer to why Dropbox isn't showing the little green sync ticks ... And now I think I know why? The APIs it's using to do that have almost certainly changed, to conform to the way Apple is now doing it.

Of course, the stumbling block might be, that Dropbox ignores the Home Directory Redirection I've got configured - surely not - and tries to create a directory such as <<boot drive>>/Users/<<user name>>/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox ... Now that would be disappointing!

Interested in others thoughts on this.

Cheers,

TA