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Forum Discussion
Dropbox silently moved my Dropbox folder and enrolled me in a beta program without asking!
I just spent 30 minutes trying to diagnose a weird issue where changes on my computer stopped syncing to phone, and I am now extremely annoyed to discover that:
- Dropbox has silently enrolled me into some kind of "Beta" program. In Settings > General > General, a button says "Leave beta". I NEVER consented to join any beta program. Why am I in a Beta program?
- Dropbox silently moved my Dropbox folder from ~/studio/Dropbox to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox. But there was no notification or warning about this - nothing. To make things worse, Dropbox left a copy of my data in the previous location. So for an unknown period of time (days? weeks?), I've been editing files in the old Dropbox folder on my computer, and they've not synced because the "real" Dropbox folder silently moved to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox. Meanwhile, I've been making changes on my phone which have synced to the server and to the new Dropbox folder. So now I have TWO copies of my data, with different changes made in each copy. So I now need to spend HOURS figuring out how to merge them back together 😡
Surely Dropbox should not do something as fundamental as enroll me in a beta program, move my Dropbox folder to a new location, duplicate all my data - and do all that without ANY form of notification or warning whatsoever??? This is crazy. I'm furious.
EDIT: Updated this post to reflect the fact that my original Dropbox folder location is in fact ~/studio/Dropbox/, and not ~/Dropbox as originally stated.
OK so I'm wondering if this is related to when I changed my Dropbox email address 11 days ago on 3 February. I did that on the Dropbox website. The Dropbox app on iOS immediately picked up the new email address, but the Dropbox app on my computer (running macOS Sonoma 14.2.1) did not. In order to fix this, I signed out and signed back in again with the macOS Dropbox app. Surprisingly, this meant I had to re-apply the Dropbox app settings. But I thought I set them to be the same as they were before.
If this is related to what happened, it still seems crazy. Simply changing your email address should leave such a trail of devastation behind!- Nancy
Dropbox Staff
Hi jmsgwd, and thanks for your post. Let’s have a look.
Can you please clarify what’s the exact app version that you see now, when hovering over the small Dropbox icon in your menu bar?
In general, you need to manually enable the early releases option, so that you’re included in the beta releases in the future.
I’m also sorry to hear about your updates. From your description, it seems like your Dropbox app was updated to the macOS on File Provider version, when you relinked/signed back into the Dropbox app.
Hope this clarifies things a bit.
Thanks for your response Nancy.
The Dropbox app version I'm running on macOS is 194.2.2179.
Yes the information on macOS on File Provider info is somewhat helpful. But it raises as many questions as it answers:- Why was there no notification or warning that this change was coming?
- How did the feature get enabled without my consent?
- Why did it create a separate copy of my Dropbox data in a new location, and leave the original Dropbox folder in the original location containing a snapshot of my data at the time the change happened?
There has to be a single source of truth! Of course I'm going to assume my Dropbox folder is still my Dropbox folder unless I'm told otherwise. My original Dropbox folder is still there, in the same location, with the same name, containing all my data, and with the same special icon in Finder. And yet it's not my Dropbox folder any more! It's a non-synced duplicate my data, which is now a fork of the real data - and I now need to figure out how to merge together 11 days worth of changes I made separately on different devices. I need help in resolving this mess 😠.
