New laptop, old external hard drive backup.

[PG84]

So I got a new Mac M2, I am struggling to set my old hard drive to backup like my previous laptop.

I plug it in, and it wants to backup the drive as a new backup, instead of updating the old backup. 

How can I make dropbox "understand" my external HDD is the same backup that's stored in the backup system? 

it's over 500 GB and I don't want to reupload it. 

[PG84]

It is saying that I should "Sign in to that device"... the hard drive is plugged, and no files have been modified since the last backup.

[Jay]

Hi @PG84, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you attach a screenshot showing the message you're receiving, so we can understand this in more detail?

This will help me to assist further!

[bedouin]

Hi there,

I'm having the same issue - new laptop, same external hard drive, but the Backup does not recognize it as being the same disk. Initially I got the "setup new drive" notification, which I silenced. In the Backup window when I clicked on the drive to back it up, it began treating it as a new drive, as you can see in the screenshot below. I'm not sure how to "sign in on that device" via the drive to hopefully convince it to treat it as a single entity.

 

[Megan · Accepted solution]

Hi @bedouin, thanks for posting here today! 

What you described is expected behavior, since you're using a new device to backup that external.

Even though it was backed up before from a different device, and since you're now using a different computer, the app will consider this a new backup altogether.

I hope this clarifies!

[PG84]

Hi @Jay, another user posted their screenshot with the ezact same issue.

Apparently this is normal behaviour for Dropbox? What’s thr point of having a backup system if you lose the ability to backup an external drive when you plug it to a different computer?

It’s now been 5 days and due to my slow internet connection, it has only uploaded 350 GB of 780GB of files dropbox had already backed up.