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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
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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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
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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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!
@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
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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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
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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Hi there!
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