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Mac app support for linking to a different Dropbox account
On iOS, when linking an app to Dropbox, you have the choice to use a different user account. This lets the authentication be done per-app. On the Mac, I don't see this as an option and it seems like ...
This sounds exactly like my issue. Things are slow because Dropbox is totally thrashing the registry. Right-clicking on the desktop (or opening the Start Menu) requires checking a few dozen registry entries, but Dropbox's indexing causes a kind of denial-of-service attack on the Windows registry.
Dropbox support was pretty cool when we started talking offline and we were able to track it down to Windows being the real troublemaker. When Dropbox checks a file during re-sync, it sends out a request to Windows to update the little icon in the corner (green checkmark, etc.).
Historically, this was fine. Maybe(?) after the latest Windows 10 update (that's my guess; the Dropbox team reported they haven't been able to reproduce the behavior), that exact same "hey, Windows, update that file's icon" request now involves checking the registry for four values, which ends up closer to thirty actual registry operations. Who knows why. Windows doesn't seem to cache the values, so it repeats the check for every file. And Dropbox seems to update the whole folder hierarchy's icons each time (despite alleged "deduplicating logic"), so you end up with something close to 150 registry calls per file in your Dropbox!
No known workaround.
All we'd need is an "I don't want icon overlays" option in Dropbox and this problem would disappear. Alternatively: Windows could fix its broken code.
Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffThe user can still choose which account they want. On Mac, the app authorization flow uses the normal /oauth2/authorize desktop web page, so they just need to sign out of the currently signed in account, if any, and then sign in to the desired one. There's a "Sign out" option in the dropdown in the top right of the page.
Thanks Greg. Could you just confirm that the user could link multiple apps, each to different accounts, and it would all work without having to re-authenticate each time? This is supported today by iOS.
- Greg-DB
The user can link multiple apps to different accounts. They may need to sign in/out of dropbox.com though, as necessary, since you can only link an app to an account when signed in to that account. Once they do so though, they don't need to re-authorize each time they use the app. Each app will receive an access token for whichever account was used, and those access tokens can be stored and re-used without further manual user intervention.)
(For uses with paired Business and personal accounts, the web portion of this is somewhat streamlined as they can be signed in to both on dropbox.com at the same time.)
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