Will dropbox ever wait to check if a drive exists?

[Jason M.50]

Installing dropbox on a drive besides the system drive isn't just helpful for me, it's essential and I've been doing it since day one. 

Mostly, no problems. However, I have seen that there are deletion issues with external drives, because dropbox doesn't realize that the drive has been disconnected or isn't functional. 

There are two helpful things that could happen:

- Dropbox doesn't sync until it verifies the location of the dropbox exists. How hard would this be? If it doesn't find the support files, it doesn't sync!

- rewind has a more surgical way of working. Why couldn't it restore files from a particular time range whilst also retaining new files AFTER that range and updating changed files with files AFTER that range?

These are no brainers to me, as someone who obviously doesn't know how dropbox works internally.

Will we ever see these essential features for professional use? 

[Walter]

Hi there @Jason M.50; thanks for posting your thoughts on this!

As you know, our desktop app cam indeed be used with an external hard drive for as long as you can ensure that the drive is connected to your computer while Dropbox is running.

If the drive is ever disconnected from the computer while Dropbox is running there is a small -but real- chance that the Dropbox software will start deleting files before realizing that the entire drive has been removed.

You can tackle this by setting it to not start upon your computer's (re)boot from the app's preferences or even use a 3rd party app or service to schedule it to start after a couple of minutes when rebooting to ensure that the external drive is mounted already. 

Regarding your additional concern, as this isn't option at this time, you can post your idea in the relevant section of our Community so other users can upvote it to show their interest. 

In the meantime, you could save any files you've added after the point you're looking to rewind your folder(s) or account to, in another location so you can re-add them after having performed the Rewind as desired. 

I know it's not optimal, but I hope this helps, Jason. 

Please let me know if you have anything else to add or ask; I'll be happy to follow up. 

[Jason M.50]

I was actually thinking the same thing and I'm glad that works out. I still think it's going to be important for you to start implementing ways to improve external storage devices and other things like that including maybe a more refined rewind function.

However, I can deal with this.

one more question, since Dropbox does indeed put service files in the Dropbox folder, is there any possible way I can reformat my computer with Dropbox off and then after installing Dropbox point it to the external drive and not have it resync a bunch of files over again?

[Walter]

You could do that by selecting the location of your Dropbox folder upon re-linking your account through the app's preferences and pointing your Dropbox folder to the one you already had in your external drive, Jason. 

At that point, the app should only re-index your file database and sync any pending changes before returning to normal activity.

Let me know if you have any other questions!