You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Request: All files available offline by default
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...
Hi everyone, and thanks for your patience.
We're re-launching the option to choose the default status of synced files in the Dropbox desktop application (in the Preferences > Sync tab) for users of the newer File Provider version.
It should be available to you shortly. If you haven't received it yet, make sure to update your desktop app, and let us know if you have any questions!
Thanks Dave, appreciate the reply.
But to make it clear this issue isn't on the visual indication that has changed in the beta. In the current beta implementation, if a user wants to make sure that all files are stored locally and available offline, we would need to manually select “make available offline” every single time a new file is added. Regardless on where it's added in the folder hierarchy.
This behaviour defeats to purpose of having a dropbox client app. Users would get the same experience (files are online-only by default) if you'd only give us access to our files via a browser with the ability to download.
Thanks again for the response, it is really appreciated! However, agreed that the feature request - which is how I had always used Dropbox - is to always sync all files and keep full, local copies of all of them on my disk.
This was clearly a key feature of the product for a very long time, and had a dedicated option in the preferences. Would just like to see it come back. If it is indeed planning to come back, I can probably wait a little while. If this is not how Dropbox intends to work in the future, then I'm not sure it will be meeting my needs.
Also note that I have been clicking "Make available offline" frequently, but for weeks of doing so, still don't have the files all local, and the Dropbox app appears to happily say that I am up to date and no need to sync. So even that behavior doesn't appear to be working as expected.
