Backing up an NTSF drive attached to a Mac

[MajorHavoc]

I recently retired a Windows 10 machine that had a 12 TB NTSF drive of pictures, videos, and music attached that is 75% full. That drive was backed up to Dropbox on the Windows machine. I bought NTFS for Mac from Paragon so that the drive is writable on my Mac, and it works like a dream. Except where Dropbox is concerned. This NTFS drive was also my Dropbox drive on the old machine. 

I would rather not have to buy a new drive,  format it for APFS or HFS+ and then manually copy everything from the old drive to the new drive.  But it looks like if I want it to backup on my Mac, that is my only choice? (except format the existing drive and hope everything from Dropbox will be put back -- but that will take almost a week!) If I try and set the old Dropbox folder on that read/writeable NTFS drive on my Mac as my Dropbox folder, I get an error telling me that the format is not supported. Really? You support those kinds of files from a Windows machine, so I know they can be stored on Dropbox. So why can't you support the same file types on my Mac? It is just a file, and it is readable and writable on that drive. I belive this is a serious oversight by Dropbox software. Since all you backup is a file anyway, just backup the file! And I know you can backup an NTFS file on a Windows machine and then sync it to a Mac, and the reverse method works as well. So why shouldn't this just work! This is obviously a software limitation that seems unnecessary to me. 

Anyway have a workaround for this issue? I guess I could install VPC on the Mac, and then switch operating systems when I want that drive backed up, but kind of defeats the purpose of Dropbox always keeping gone backed up, and switch the OS is a pain in the &**( and takes a long time. 

Dropbox: How hard would it be to set NTFS files and legal files to sync on the Mac? This might be a time I stop using Dropbox and go to Cloudflare or some other cloud backup that knows how to support multiple file systems on a Mac. Disappointed by what is otherwise excellent software. 

[Jay · Accepted solution]

Hi @MajorHavoc, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Currently, the supported file systems that are supported on Mac OS for Dropbox Backup are HFS+, APFS, exFAT, and FAT32. 

There isn't any official workaround for these supported file systems, so if another user does provide one here, we would recommend caution when using it.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.

[MajorHavoc]

Thanks Jay. Could you please drop the request into the wish list please. This is not as uncommon as you think, people attaching NTFS drives to a Mac.  Thanks

[Jay]

If you wish, you can suggest this change for others to vote on, so the dev team can look into this in future! 

[MajorHavoc]

Ok, went to the link you suggested, and added it as a suggestion for voting, but I do not see it listed there. Is there some trick I need to know, or do some suggestions just get booted immediately?  Just curious. 

[Hannah]

Hey @MajorHavoc, from what I can see, your other post is currently in our Ideas section.

However, you can definitely take a look at our 10 tips for submitting an idea for more info.