Request regarding MacOS X 10.10 (Yosemite) & 10.11 (El Capitan)

[justmeinNJ]

I just received a notice that dropbox will cease support for OS 10.10 and 10.11.

The notice, giving it the most leeway i can, indicated that i should consider upgrading my OS or use a web browser.  This is not always possible.

For many of us, we are at the end of the line re: OS upgrades. I have an old macbook pro that i use for a few light tasks - but the data must be available on others machines. I use dropbox for this.  I also cannot use the web browser unless i wish to upload files with each change.  Impractical.

I will likely wind up switching to a different cloud service, which i would prefer not to do - yet maybe i must.

I don't know why you are ending support. The clients exist already and are unlikely to require many changes, if any.  Please reconsider.

--justmeinNJ

[Colin W.1]

@Walter: I'm another one that will have to find some other service and stop paying you. Can I claim a credit for the unused part year?

I'm very unhappy about the very short notice and will go out of my way to let people know this is how you treat paying customers.

Not even giving a consistent end date is very poor too, is the organisation in crisis there?

I want to continue with Adobe apps I purchased, I do not want monthly fees but Adobe required new CC cloud subs for new OS, my CS6 will not run - I have tested this. I do not want a new machine for my main work platform, it is very stable, current uptime 120 days. I like to run low level logging software and the old style Apple logging rather than unified logging.  I have exactly what I want except I must suddenly find a new file sharing system, and this will involve others who also pay leaving so here goes a chain of loyal paying customers who will probably all turn into advocates against DropBox.

So I must choose CS6 or DropBox? Bye bye Dropbox!!!

[Robinz]

I'm one of those that has several aged macs for different reasons. My oldest Mac hasn't synced with Dropbox anymore for a while now, but I don't do major work on it anymore. I use it with some old applications that aren't available anymore. But my next oldest Mac is my main hub for the same reasons many of you say. That being disconnected from Dropbox will seriously affect my work. I think rather than us complaining to each other, we need to connect with someone at the top who can listen. Customer support on Twitter just gives a canned answer. Does anyone have any friends in the media? Or a business account on LinkedIn?

[Colin W.1]

I've gone into "no hope with them" mode. Looking at my migration options, starting with 1Password. If that goes to iCloud OK then so does everything else, even though I have suspected data losses in the past with Notes and some other stuff. I'll just keep on top of good local versioned backups too!

Looking through some of their support site and other commentary about DB I think they've had their day and got to the hard point of trying to expand from a place you would not start from. It's tough and they'll give us all a hard time on the way I suspect.

 A shame as I like the incremental efficient file synch stuff, though there was lots of data replication and high CPU usage etc at times that has annoyed me for years...

[Chern]

@Colin W.1, same here. Publisher working third book using cs5 and 6 from decade ago. Elcapitan 10.11

I don't know if you chased up the thread, I've moved to pCloud with a lifetime subscription. Basically Downloaded, installed, pointed the main computer to sync whatever thats in the Dropbox folder, and installed pCloud on the rest of the computers to sync over LAN, Re path links to pcloud folder. Works out cheaper too as it is a one-time payment.

Shame on @dropbox, they had to do this so suddenly, I had to migrate my cloud data 3 days before a flight.

[Chern]

They could have just kept existing 10.11 users on a version of "Dropbox lite" for what it's worth, and increase the price of newer versions and earn more.

[Colin W.1]

Seems that new MacOS will force a new design on them and they don't want to do that AND run the old system. Seems like a bad way to go to me, from the eclectic light site in Jan 2022 that I linked before:

DropBox Desktop and Microsoft OneDrive

Both of these services have relied on kernel extensions to provide seamless access to items stored remotely. As from macOS 12.3, those kernel extensions won’t be supported any more, so both services are working on replacements.

One Drive will not support HFS+ either (most older non SSD drives).

Looking at iCloud to consider issues I also decided to start with Howard's writings, especially around backup and integrity testing:

https://eclecticlight.co/?s=icloud

I'll look into pCloud (sorry but thought that p was just a typo!) Not sure a one off pay is long term sustainable business as they have to keep paying for power, staff, network?

[JackinCA]

After my original post a few days ago, I did the upgrade to Mac 10.15 and viola! My MS Office Word, Excel, and Powerpoint no longer work.  So I needed to buy a monthly subscription for MS Office as a result of the Dropbox upgrade decision. Also,  the advice on this support community is not always edited or put into some context. I read here that I would need to erase my local hard drive files and reload them down from the Dropbox cloud after upgrading. That turned out to be bad advice, so I stopped the process--but did not realize that Dropbox would take three days to synch this decision, and at the end--voila! My main work folder is only on the Dropbox cloud but not accessible on my harddrive. Following all the written instructions and cautions about downloading an 800GB folder or even just folders within the folder, all I ever got was an error message "Zip Failed".Wrote customer support for help two days ago and nothing back from them yet. I've gone from thinking that I don't know how Dropbox works to thinking that the Dropbox Company does not know how it works.

[Robinz]

That is a shame that they are sending us all in a tizzy over this news. I'm trying to stay calm and thinking that since our files will still be accessible through the website, I will have to brush up on how to work that way. It won't be as convenient as having it appear like an external drive on my computer but it will have to do. It's more important that this computer stays with El Capitan because of all the other desktop applications. My phone, iPad and one other computer are more up to date. I'm just going to stop worrying for now. I'm sorry that they are causing everyone such stress. It's not very customer friendly.

[ADE Media]

I've upgraded an old (late 2014) Mac Mini today to run Mojave and put that onto the network as a shared device. Seems to be working ok just doing Dropbox duties but haven't really tested it yet and it runs way too slooooow to do anything else. Still, hopefully problem solved for now with minimal intervention and I can get back to doing some proper work. I'm certainly NOT going to upgrade the OS on our macs and rewrite applications and scripts (which are all 32 bit but super stable) just yet, it'll cause far more problems than it'll solve and ultimately cause us to loose business.

I still think this is pretty poor customer service, I'd expect at least three months notice for decommissioning (ideally six months). Fully understand if it was a free service but for users like us it's not and long standing customers who pay for the software really do deserve better.

[Colin W.1]

I strongly agree about the timescales here. This was visible as coming down the line to an independent Mac commentator & tech hero Howard Oakley in January 2022, so the DB team must have known it was coming even if the date was unsure...

Bad behaviour not give at least early warning of impending changes, I think.