External Drives & Smart Sync

[dhkirk]

I know this has been kicked around for at least five years, but perhaps I've missed some new advances ...

My situation ... I have multi-TB of data, of which I want to store ~1.75TB in Dropbox and share, but the largest of my systems has only 500GB. I have a 2TB Dropbox account.

Two years ago I moved the Dropbox folder to an external drive and got bit by the "rarely" situation of the drive not being available at startup and Dropbox deleting everything. For the life of me I really can't see why this is even a problem, how about a message that says "did you really mean to disconnect your folder?".

Then I tried SmartSync and selected Online ... that worked GREAT, apart from the (few) times where I didn't have a network connection and needed the file. But in normal circumstances when an app opened a file that wasn't local, Dropbox would download it and then the app would just work.  Brilliant!!!!! Loved it, until ... my wife's workflow includes moving a file out of the Dropbox folder into a non-Dropbox folder for archive, and thinking that Dropbox would download the file before the Move, assumed that she had a perfect copy. WRONG!!!!! After weeks of interaction with Dropbox support, they discovered that Mac Finder actions (Move/Copy) did NOT give Dropbox the opportunity to pre-download the file.  The result, she had perfectly achived the zero-byte placeholders. Of course, we only discovered this when we went to restore the file form archive, only to restore nothing but the zero-byte placeholder. And of course, we only discovered this 45 days after the files were Moved/deleted.

So my hope is that there may be solution, or at a minimum, that Dropbox develoipment acknowledges the requirement to enable the Dropbox folder to SAFELY be located on an external drive? 

Is there?

[Jay]

Hi @dhkirk, thanks for posting on the Community!

Currently, if the Dropbox desktop application doesn't detect the Dropbox folder, then it could result in data deletion.

There isn't a feature in the desktop app to detect if the Dropbox desktop application is on an external drive or not, although it is generally not recommended.

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

[dhkirk]

Thnx Jay. I understand that. I had requested Dropbox fix that (I think) three years ago, as it appears have many in here. Is Dropbox considering fixing this? If so, where in the dev priority list is it?

[Jay]

There isn't a way to see the future roadmap for the dev team at this time, or if it is being considered.

If people vote on this idea in the ideas forum, then it's possible that this could help the team consider this.