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Jon C.10's avatar
Jon C.10
Collaborator | Level 8
3 years ago
Solved

Dropbox removing external disk support for Mac users

In case anyone's unaware... if you're a Mac user storing your Dropbox on an external drive, you'll shortly lose that ability.   https://talk.tidbits.com/t/dropbox-drops-support-for-storing-files-...
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  • BenDBX's avatar
    BenDBX
    2 years ago
    Hi Everybody,
     
    We’re excited to share that external drive support for Dropbox for macOS on File Provider is now available for testing as a beta feature. This is available to some users today and will be available to additional users on a rolling basis. In order to be eligible to test this feature, please follow the instructions in this Help Center article. 
     
    Keep in mind that participation in beta programs is subject to the certain terms and conditions. There are certain additional participation requirements:
    • This beta is only available to US-based users
    • You must be on macOS 15 beta
    • You must have an external drive that is APFS formatted and encrypted
     
    Please let me know if you have any further questions!
iagdotme's avatar
iagdotme
Helpful | Level 5
3 years ago

Thanks, Mark.

 

Would it be cynical of me to think this could be Apple wanting us to upgrade our Macs to ones with HUGE hard drives? 😉

I can't seem to find any explanations of what Apple are doing and that they are definitely no longer supporting external drives. I can't be the only person who needs to do this.

dandid's avatar
dandid
Helpful | Level 7
3 years ago

I think DropBox wanted to sell to apple years ago but Steve Jobs was adamant that it wasn't anything worth buying and that 'mobile me' was going to be just as good (haha). even iCloud files is a poorly implemented option of something meant to do a similar job. But I think they want to sell more iCloud storage to everyone. They are pushing for subscriptions and service bundles like with Apple One and Arcade etc. For probably high proportion of Apple customers they won't understand the difference between more iCloud space and a service like drop box, and storage beyond 1 or 2Tb very rare. Then for the big boys that they have closer ties with, they are likely using their own proprietary synching or exchange type stuff that means these changes don't bother them. it's the usual 'Pros' that get the shaft.

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