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.

[dandid]

drop box will essentially work as it currently does for you, although your Mac is going to be a little 'fuller' than it needs to be. The main issue arrises for people who need local/downloaded/ready-to-use files that are collectively larger than their system drive. so many people use an external drive for DB location because they have 2TB or 8Tb of video files for example and need them available to use in projects, but local internal drive is very rarely that large and empty.

[dandid]

have you read this from another thread here..>>

However a Reddit user came up with a possible workaround:

"It is linked to your home user folder location. If you move your home folder to an external drive, dropbox goes with it. And for that matter, so do google drive, one drive, box etc."

[dandid]

Yes been reading this elsewhere seems like the solution,

your additional reminder about local admin is REALLY important, and a great note to myself to remember.

Why is dropbox not reminding people this is the best work around. its all the larger users that it affects and we're likely to understand the moving home folder situation well enough.

I have an NVME drive in an external enclosure that didn't cost too much, works as fast as the internal drive in my macbookpro so definitely work seeking out, prices may be getting close to affordable for <2Tb by now too? 

[dandid]

the first 'fix' is apples idea of no need to have them available locally, they 'just synch' as needed but all live in the cloud.

the second fix involves migrating your whole home directory (including the 'new upgraded dropbox' folder)  to an external drive that is bigger and cheaper than the drives apple sells in its machines.

[TRO_Berlin]

Pushing this topic again.

Moving your home directory cannot be the solution that will be accepted to be honest... A lot of large external storage devices are still HDDs, you would slow down your mac by moving the home directory to HDDs / a HDD RAID.

Any Update from the Dropbox Team on this? OneDrive has an official how-to / solution on their website for a few months now... 

[Andrew Parker]

Our "solution" has been to not do any updates on our Macs, so we're sat on Monterey. It's obviously going to become a problem when a new Mac gets added into the mix, but for the moment it's working. 

[BBGun987]

THIS is why I've been reading through all of the messages here. I kept thinking why not put an Alias or Symlink back in the Home directory? It could solve all the problems with expected paths. I'm a developer and keep all of my active projects on Dropbox. No, I'm not going to change all of the paths for my various projects. Ridiculous! Why doesn't the Dropbox installer perform this Symlink? I might stop saying no to the new version now. THANK YOU

[theviewer1985]

I've been following this thread for months. Checking back at random to see if there are any fixes.

It's beginning to seem like there is a workaround now? Although I am confused what it is... I am seeing some people mention symlinks (although surely something this simple would have been thought of at the beginning of this 'upgrade'?)

And others talking about moving your whole home folder... which seems plausible if you have a big SSD. Although I'd be afraid of what happens if you unplug the ssd by mistake - will the computer explode into dust or will it just require plugging back in and everything carries on?

In either case, symlink or moving home folders - can someone give instructions on how to do them?

Thanks