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
Jon C.10
2 years agoCollaborator | Level 8
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...
- 5 months agoHi Everybody,We’re excited to share that external drive support for Dropbox for macOS on File Provider is now available for testing as a beta feature. This is available to some users today and will be available to additional users on a rolling basis. In order to be eligible to test this feature, please follow the instructions in this Help Center article.Keep in mind that participation in beta programs is subject to the certain terms and conditions. There are certain additional participation requirements:
- This beta is only available to US-based users
- You must be on macOS 15 beta
- You must have an external drive that is APFS formatted and encrypted
Please let me know if you have any further questions!
KzDbx
Community 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.
millifoo
2 years agoHelpful | Level 7
"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.
- Peter Proulx2 years agoHelpful | Level 5
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
- millifoo2 years agoHelpful | Level 7
I don't think you can go back to the old version. It auto-updates, and so far as I know DropBox doesn't let you revert to older versions.
As a temporary workaround (and it may be permanent if it works well) I'm now using Mountain Duck for syncing to my external drive:
- Bluebiycle2 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Very interesting will look at this. The crucial thing for us, is that we all have the same mount points, to avoid relinking media to our editing applications as we collaborate with each other
- Jamesgangcc2 years agoCollaborator | Level 9
Peter Proulx OMG.... good luck with that! Years ago I accidentally allowed Dropbox to "just simply" backup my mac. I'm still dealing with that issue. Moving the folders over to externals from dropbox has been interesting. I'm finding triplicates in some situations (some are my fault, you know, the "have I saved this?" conundrum) and others from having to go back and forth twice with Dropbox. My computer today slowed to a crawl while Dropbox was "synched" or connected or whatever. Finally...
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