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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...
Just curious what sort of plan do you have for 30TB Dropbox sync? The Advanced Business plan, or the Entreprise plan? How much do you pay monthly (per user, and total) and did you have to set up a 3-user repository folder that is different vs. the normal Dropbox folder of the Personal and Pro plans? So it's like having 3 users anyway even if you're alone?
Cheers and good luck.
We have a business advanced plan with 6 users that we pay about $1,700/ year for. This is an unlimited plan, so every time we reach our storage limit, they give us more space. Unfortunately this obviously won’t work anymore with the DropBox “upgrade” unless I can find computers with 30-40TB internal hard drives.
@shinbeth KyleKoch yes, can I just echo comments, in the desperate hope that DB are monitoring the thread and will manage our expectations on this proportionally.
We are part of huge enterprise team subscription- many petabytes, perhaps our part of that operation has 100TB. Although not specifically designed for the task, we work entirely out of Dropbox Sync, to identical named external volumes, for video editing and collaboration. We simply sync the folder we need for the week and maintain a number of other folders for generic assets. Dropbox is our Asset Manager!
It's not about drive speed, it's not about capacity per se, it's about headroom. We need at least 10TB of overhead, to effectively selectively sync and bring offline (stupid word they should have left it as "local") media assets.
When done we simply let it go. Space is effectively infinite in the Cloud, although we do archive and manage it periodically. It's a profoundly efficient workflow, that will eventually overtake on-site location monolithic media servers, for content production.
One issue is that the local caches do not empty, for up to 3 days after making files "online" only. There is a procedure for deleting this, to clear space, it's a safeguard for when files may not have been uploaded, but works against our workflow. I'd like an undo feature plus a way of space being immediately released. Even more reason for extra storage headroom. You do not want to accidentally unhitch the wrong material, because you are running out of local storage!
There's a lot of binary and uninformed traffic on this thread, about Dropbox generally, and red herrings about speed, that are either irrelevant, or just not true. It works, it's efficient, the LAN share feature is astonishing, for locally sharing assets, without recourse to the cloud. The whole thing gives us distributed resilience across a number of Macs, with access anywhere in the world. That is big deal.
We have to be able to continue to sync to external volumes. Apple have depreciated an API, this is what they do, they have their reasons and unfortunately it's on Dropbox to work out a solution, to maintain the service. Otherwise it becomes useless for us.
I'll just add that, if you have a decent cabled internet and sync only a small number of folders in Preferences and then selectively sync beyond, the operation is flawless. Dropbox is very good indeed.Bluebicycle thank you very much for adding your thoughts.
I'm still INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATED this thread is STILL MARKED as "SOLVED."
It is not solved.
IT IS NOT SOLVED.
IT IS NOT SOLVED.
Kicking the can down the road, aka "we won't upgrade you now but we are not officially saying we will support external drives" is NOT A SOLVE.
@dropbox please please do not mark this as solved.
- This is NOT SOLVED.
I just had a session if DB help via chat and the rep said it wasn’t anything to do with Dropbox, it had to do with the OS and that I could update without any worry. She repeated it several times.
Based on the info that was published; I’m still very concerned about suddenly not having Dropbox accessible on my 20TB external RAID. We have 16TB active currently. No OS can handle that. We use the dropbox company wide in a similar manner - works flawlessly.
A shame to see Dropbox not offering a solution here.
- shinbeth
Yes, all users see the green check when synced, or the blue sync icon as files are syncing. We use it for video editing but also for production documents. So for editors, they have the entire DropBox synced locally, where as a producer might only have the smaller document folders. It’s a great system so I’m hoping they continue to support it. But I’m on a trial at Sync.com now and it seems to offer a very similar solution, for just slightly cheaper, and does still allow for syncing to an external drive. shinbeth the architecture of the machines I build tend to have a fast SSD for OS, fast SSD for cache, fast Media Raid or SSD (sometimes a dedicated Read and a dedicated Write). Having the multiple data channels via the mainboard can make a difference in stability and speed for Editing Software. More crashes occur when everything is driving from a single SSD (especially if it is the OS and Programs drive). When it gets even more intense is with multi-cam work where you have several streams of video simultaneously. To be honest, I can't imagine paying the apple tax on a 16TB SSD internally; not when equivalent nvmeSSD raids can deliver the same speeds or higher for a fraction of the cost.
Hi ... Not sure if this helps .... Windows NTFS can handle a 16TB partition if the cluster size is the default 4096 bytes.
After many, many years with Dropbox and partly because of this issue we have migrated over to Office 365 & Onedrive with better results.
So it turns out https://www.dropbox.com/backup/all shows the sync status and the tick there instead, I'm cool with that.
Pretty useful feature indeed Dropbox to be able to sync external drives.
Please don't change this feature on Mac please 🙂 the people here are right and I fully support them.
jmeredi2 I tested sync.com and while it is ⅔ of the cost for unlimited and has point-to-point encryption (which is far superior than what DB offers), it is much slower for up/down xfer. I suspect its partly because of the encryption key, but that's only a guess. They capped out at 40Mbps I think. Possibly much less. Might have been as low as 4Mbps. Can't remember exactly what the limit was but it would have taken over a year to upload our assets vs 2 months for DB.
Their security protocol is great tho. Government's have confirmed its okay to use at this time. DB is not an approved supplier tho.
We have 2.5Gb internet here so it wasn't an issue with our local connection.
