No dialog box when connecting external HD?

[Jennifer G.29]

I want to back up my external HD to my Dropbox account.

What should happen: When I connect the external drive, I should get a popup that asks if I want to back up the external drive, I select it, then set it up.

What does happen: Nothing. I don't get a popup when I connect the external drive. In Preferences/Backups, the "Hide all setup notifications when new external drives are plugged-in" is NOT selected and never has been.

The only instructions Support could provide are "You get a pop up window saying back up this external hard drive and you select it and then you click on set up." I don't get the popup, so I can't do this.

I don't see another way to set the external drive to back up. I know this is a relatively new feature, but it isn't working at all for me and I haven't seen any other threads with this problem. How can I find a way to do this? Thanks for your help.

[Walter]

Hey there @Jennifer G.29 - thanks for posting on our Community and happy Monday!

If you've ensured that our desktop app is running on your computer and that the external drive's filesystem is a supported one, you should get that pop-up when you plug your external drive into your machine. 

Just keep in mind that this feature only supports external drives with filesystem type NTFS  for Windows and APFS or HFS+ for Macs.

Can you double check if your external drive is supported? 

Let me know what you find and we'll take it from there, Jennifer. 

 

[Jennifer G.29]

Hi Walter, and thanks for your reply. The drive in my original question didn't have the right file system.

However, I reformatted another external drive as APFS encrypted and moved the files onto it. I still don't get a popup when I plug it in. Also, I don't see the Dropbox menu when I right-click on the folders or files; I do have that menu on all the files in the Dropbox folder. Other ideas? Thanks.

[Jay]

 Hi @Jennifer G.29, currently the external drive backup works for APFS and HFS+ for Mac devices. 

Since APFS Encrypted isn't specifically mentioned there, could you try a normal APFS-formatted drive and see if that is detected by the Dropbox desktop application?

[Jennifer G.29]

OK, now I've done it again with APFS. I got the popup when the formatting was finished, before I'd moved anything to the drive. I closed it then (without checking the box) because it's about 800GB of files and I didn't want to slow down my machine the whole day doing the transfer between drives and backup to Dropbox at the same time.

Now the file transfer is done. I've disconnected and reconnected, restarted, renamed the drive on another computer, and I can't get that popup again. Do I really have to reformat the drive just to be able to select this external drive to back up to Dropbox? Thank you for your help!

[Rich]

---

@Jennifer G.29 wrote:

Now the file transfer is done. I've disconnected and reconnected, restarted, renamed the drive on another computer, and I can't get that popup again.

---

Check the drive for hidden files. I can't comment on the drive backup function, but when you use Camera Uploads, Dropbox drops a hidden file on the drive to identify it. If you have such a file, delete it and then disconnect/reconnect the drive.

[Jay]

The way the external drive backup works is by the unique identifier in the drive itself. If the drive was renamed, this might not be enough to be seen as a different device.

Can I ask why you want to backup the external drive on another machine? Did you change the files in the drive itself?

[ylansegal]

I am having the same issue: Connecting an external hard drive doesn't trigger dropbox to prompt for backup.

I've tried to search for hidden files in the drive root, but can't find anything dropbox related (I only see .DS_Store and .localized). 

I've also tried changing the drive UUID (similar to what is listed here https://superuser.com/questions/127191/how-does-one-change-the-uuid-of-a-volume-on-mac-os-x-10-6, but using apfs.util). I can confirm that the UUID changed, but I still don't get a prompt for dropbox.

Is there no way to tell dropbox to backup an external drive without having to wait for it to prompt me? My wife just purchased 2TB of dropbox space for this feature alone, and now she can't use it.

Please advise.

[Megan]

Hey @ylansegal, let's see what we can find together on this! 

Can I ask the storage size on your external disk, please?

Keep me posted.

[ylansegal]

It's a 4TB disk. It's partitioned into two 2TB volumes. Formatted using APFS.

Thank you,