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
Disaster: 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-on...
This is also extremely worrisome to our future as well. We've spent years revolving around this feature and it is absolutely business critical. Without this feature of moving the sync folder anywhere, our entire sector of business will come to a complete stop. We use this feature so much because of the advantages it brings to processing, rendering and handling files locally that we can not do efficiently in the cloud. As of right now, we're being advised to not update the OS and thus the app will not get updated and remove the feature. However when we bring a new computer onboard, we will be forced to use the new OS that the machine ships with and will not be able to run a legacy OS and will be forced into the app version without the folder relocation. This is very worrisome. Without this particular feature, if we're forced to change our workflow, we're probably going to have to change our platform altogether. It would be a tough sell to attempt to use and pay for two different systems. We really don't want to leave Dropbox! You've been so great to us for so long!
Help us Dropbox Team, You're our only hope!
KzDbxCommunity Manager
Hello everyone. Thank you for your feedback.
We understand that this is a significant pain point for you and your teams that rely on having Dropbox sync on external drives.
Currently, the File Provider API only supports your Dropbox folder in ~/Library/CloudStorage. We are actively working on a solution to support external drives on the updated Dropbox for macOS. While we work to implement a solution, customers who have their Dropbox folder on an external drive will not be migrated to the updated macOS experience. External drive support will continue to work as usual on your current experience.
We will keep you updated when we have more details to share."While we work to implement a solution, customers who have their Dropbox folder on an external drive will not be migrated to the updated macOS experience. External drive support will continue to work as usual on your current experience."
Hallelujah! Thank you, Dropbox, for listening.
May I suggest that in the future, for those of us who contacted Customer Support directly, you give us mere mortals confirmation that our feedback is being taken seriously and being passed upwards?
I made an attempt at that and was told outright by the service person that they would not escalate the issue. After asking to escalate the issue 6 times, I was told:
"Charlotte: Unfortunately, I cannot escalate your case, I'm really sorry that I can't help more with this"
As a Business Advanced customer, that's completely unacceptable.
You were ->this<- close to losing us as a customer; in fact we were testing out OneDrive today to see if it'd fit our needs.
Not realizing this was a limitation I upgraded one of my laptops to the new version. Anything saved on the laptop running the new version is not syncing with my main system with external storage. How can I revert my laptop to the old version of DropBox?
Thanks,
Pete
THANK GOODNESS!!!
This issue had me spinning out for days, now, hardly allowing me to think of anything else, because it would have impacted my workflow gravely, or rather, made it impossible to work with my clients and sub-contractor as I had been for over a decade.
Finally, there is hope that this will all be taken care of in due time, and my files are safe on my external NVMe's, in the meantime. I had just invested over $2000 in external RAID and NVMe storage solutions to replace the spinning drives that previously held my 2,2TB Dropbox file library, and was overjoyed to finally use them as if they were stored on internal storage...and then the bad news, which made my heart sink.
Thank you for giving this the urgent care it deserves and working on avoiding a mass exodus from Dropbox to...well...where would we go?Can I just clarify one thing? We have updated one Mac Studio to Ventura 13.2 and Dropbox Sync is still working to an external 16TB GRaid SSD. Should that be the case?
Just to reinforce what others have said, if it is no longer possible to be able to use an external volumes to sync, this is a massive problem for us. We daily sync TBs of material up and down all over the world, and have built a very robust workflow around this at The BBC. All our paths are the same, for each member of the team eg. VOLUMES/CLICK DROPBOX and those drives are external. Even a 4TB internal Volume will not work, for many of us as we need much more headroom.
I know that Apple have their reasons for doing this, not least security, but with millions of users relying on Dropbox Sync for their workflows, it seems inconceivable that Dropbox can't come up with a solution/ workaround.
If we can get clarity on Ventura still working with external Dropbox Sync that would be good, many thanks."Even a 4TB internal Volume will not work, for many of us as we need much more headroom."
Glad to see I'm not the only one using 16TB SSD. Dropbox would fix the situation by simply offering more storage space so that we can all use large SSDs (internal in my case). But it seems that Dropbox in 2023 still lags 10 years behind in terms of what their customers need. 3/4TB hard limits are ridiculously low plans for any serious professional out there.
