Not enough storage on Mac but my external USB does not seem to support the new dropbox

[Sylvs]

Hi,

I use an external disk to host my dropbox account as I don't have enough storage to save all my documetns on my laptop's hard drive. It used to work perferctly but I now get messages asking me to move my Dropbox folder to a filesystem or partition that meets the new requirementso to make sure that my files continue to sync.

I have no idea what a HFS+ or APFS-formatted hard drive is. My disk seems to be ExFat format. 

I am not sure what I should do as I can't move them back onto the desktop as I don't have enough memory left. 

Any advise?

Thanks

[Pikamander2]

Hi Sylvs,

Hard drives and other forms of storage like flash drives and solid state drives have to be formatted with a "file system" like NTFS or exFAT or APFS.

The Dropbox desktop app for Mac only supports HFS+ or APFS-formatted drives.

You'll need to reformat your flash drive as APFS to make it work with Dropbox. Note that Windows can't natively work with the APFS file system, so if you're also using that flash drive on Windows computers, you may run into issues.

[Sylvs]

Thanks Pikamander2,

I worried this would be the case. I also have other files stored on this external drive which I am worried of loosing in this process  of reformatting. I guess I have to buy another storage to back up the entire drive first and then reform it. 

Will dropbox automatically copy my files onto the new drive or do I have to download a new  version of the dropbox app first and then move the files back on my external drive?

[Jay · Accepted solution]

Hi there, after you install the Dropbox desktop application and in the advanced settings choose the external drive to hold the folder (once it has been formatted correctly), you have two options.

Firstly, you can just have a clean slate, and let the Dropbox app download all the files again from the site. This is the simplest, but longest process, depending on your internet connection.

The second option would be to copy the files across from the second external drive onto the reformatted external drive. Steps on what to do can be found on this article.

Hope this helps!