Request: All files available offline by default

[Tim T.13]

Moving the Mac to the new File Provider is great - very happy this is finally happening and support on the new M1 is much better. Kudos!

Feature request: Really miss the feature to have Dropbox default to making all files downloaded and available for offline open/save. I will always, 100% of the time, want Dropbox to keep all my selected-to-sync files to also be downloaded and available for offline use. 

I know you can right-click to request offline availability, but this creates a bit of an unclear situation as you can't see by looking at a file in Finder whether it is supposed to be offline available or not.  I want this to just be the way Dropbox works.

Since there is the option to do this on a per file / folder basis using right-click, seems likely possible for Dropbox to make this effectively on-by-default for every file, with the user doing the gesture. 

[alissa914]

OneDrive will download the files before it moves the file.  Dropbox will not even try to download the file.  It just moves the placeholder.  Regardless of "oh, this is Apple" or whatever, the fact that it does it means that it should disable online only until it finds a way to fix it.

The fact OneDrive doesn't have this problem seems to indicate that Dropbox could fix it but hasn't yet.

Of course, it's not deliberate.  I had someone from Dropbox say "well, you should just download them first...."  That is a cop-out to the problem.  That's an answer someone gives from tech support when they have no interest in fixing it.  And that's their choice... fine.  I have choices too and now have to consider them because of this bug. 

I have a 30 days to recover what I see as missing files and if even 1 file is missing because it was marked online only inside a subfolder, now I have a problem if I don't realize it's missing in 30 days.  It doesn't make sense why I'd want a 0kB placeholder file and why people think this is "by design" or what someone should see and learn a lesson from.... it's just apathy to the problem.

[chhawkes]

just resolved my issue by right clicking on the Dropbox folder (buried in user/Library/CloudStorage/DROPBOX) and scrolling to 'Make available offline' (as mentioned by pervious post).

Could NOT find this menu option anywhere else.

[jdag]

The "Make Available Offline" option as described by @chhawkes does seems to bring back functionality as it used to be.  I hope it is persistent with upgrades.  I made that change a couple of days ago, it has persisted through a computer restart as well as the MacOS update to Ventura 13.1.

I was able to create a document on my iPhone via the "Scan" function, and within seconds the document appeared in my root Dropbox folder as it always had in the past.

[DolphinU1]

What is strange about this procedure is there is no feedback on what is happening. No indication of the current setting. Normally, when you make changes, there's something showing the current state, then you make your change and that change is indicated in some manner. When you do the procedure mention, you don't have a lot of confidence that it's actually working. I've started just putting everything on a USB flash drive, just like we did 20 years ago.

[gc_]

What a regression for Dropbox. It used to be the most reliable cloud service. I would just totally trust the checkmark in the menu bar: I would be 100% sure that my file was locally available on all of my desktops. Not anymore! I might have to check manually because it might well be Dropbox just put there a placeholder, and the only way I have to proceed is to select again on the Dropbox folder "Make available offline" anyway with no feedback! It might well be that some file added later is just downoloaded as a placeholder, and I will never discover it in the my folder hierarchy... 

[DolphinU1]

Dropbox was fun while it lasted. However, with large capacity USB sticks being relatively inexpensive. I have found it's easier and more reliable to just make a copy of my documents file and travel with it. Anything that I alter I put in a unique folder where I put it back where it was on my main Mac.

[Tim T.13]

Ultimately I find that the new behavior works pretty well, but the above comment about feedback is the big remaining issue.

You can right click the same folder you already set to "Make offline" and the option is still there. So you can re-click it over and over, which seems wrong.

From what I can tell, none of the visual indicators are 100% reliable to show that content (and most importantly, sub-folders and new files within) will all download automatically within a folder.

So I'm optimistic that things seem to be working much better, but the lack of indications still leave a lot of anxiety. This was the great thing about the old "always offline" preference feature. You set it and knew that Dropbox would always do what you wanted.

[pots]

The crux of this issue is a conflict in expectation between two simple icons. The green check icon supposedly means "Available Offline". But the gray cloud icon means "Not Downloaded". It seems to me that these two should be mutually exclusive. Either it's available offline OR it's not downloaded. There should be no hybrid state.

[plumvalley]

When I go to that path and click make files available offline it doesn't do anything at all. Were there any other steps you did first such as reinstalling dropbox?

@chhawkes

[Pookeyblow]

The green icon means it's synced and online. The grey icon means it's not downloaded locally.