download from cloud to external drive

[adelaidesean]

Questions like this have been asked before, but I haven't found an answer yet. My apologies if I missed something.

I am going to Antarctica for a year, and my access to the internet will not be guaranteed. I wish, therefore, to create a local back-up of the data I have stored in Dropbox. I know that I could, in theory, download everything to my laptop and copy it from there - but the internal hard drive of my laptop is not sufficient to contain all the data I have saved to Dropbox. Neither do I want to set an external drive as the default location for my Dropbox to sync to, because I read that there are risks involved in doing this. How, then, can I download everything from the could to the external drive directly?

[Mark · Accepted solution]

The only way to do that is to manually download via the website and save it manually to the drive (as in select each file or folder and choose the download location as the external drive)

[adelaidesean]

Thanks. I was hoping that wouldn't be the case, but it's good to know for sure.

[MattHeck]

I just searched around, and found lots of terrible solutions, until I realized a very easy solve. In Chrome, or Safari go to Preferences / Downloads / and change the download location to your external hard drive. Done. 

Anything you download will now go directly to the folder you chose on the external hard drive. Not just Dropbox, but everything. So make sure to change it back when you're done.  Or not. As ya wish.

Come on thumbs up, gimme gimme. I don't usually write these things. Cheers!

[MattHeck]

It's not. 

I just searched around, and found lots of terrible solutions, until I realized a very easy solve. In Chrome, or Safari go to Preferences / Downloads / and change the download location to your external hard drive. Done. 

Anything you download will now go directly to the folder you chose on the external hard drive. Not just Dropbox, but everything. So make sure to change it back when you're done.  Or not. As ya wish.

Come on thumbs up, gimme gimme. I don't usually write these things. Cheers!

[son_ste]

salve, vorrei sapere se c'è la possibilità di scaricare i file residenti in dropbox direttamente su hdd esterno senza dover prima scaricarli sul hdd locale e poi copiarli su quello esterno. Avendo tanti dati su dropbox non potrei scaricare tutto su hdd locale perchè lo spazio non sarebbe abbastanza, chiedo quindi se c'è la possibilità di farlo direttamente su hdd esterno. grazie

[Walter]

Hi @son_ste, I just merged your post under this discussion as I think your query echoes the OP (original post) here. 

Feel free to take a look and let us know if you have any other questions. 

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Ciao @son_ste, ho appena unito il tuo post a questa discussione poiché penso che la tua domanda faccia eco all'OP (post originale) qui.

Sentiti libero di dare un'occhiata e facci sapere se hai altre domande.

[PaulZissa]

Thank you! It works!