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Forum Discussion

Jon C.10's avatar
Jon C.10
Collaborator | Level 8
2 years ago

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...
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  • BenDBX's avatar
    BenDBX
    4 months ago
    Hi 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!
UKD's avatar
UKD
Experienced | Level 12

ArthurPix I'm with you here totally. I haven't updated any of my teams Macs because of what Dropbox is doing. Plus with all the change moving over to M chips it's been a bit daunting as to what to go for. To upgrade to a 4TB Apple drive on a base Mac Studio is a £1,200 upgrade against the cost of the whole machine with 512GB storage of £1,999. That's just greedy.

 

The biggest problems have been the shear cost of internal storage by Apple and obviously this API change they implemented that seems to be stopping Dropbox (and maybe others?) from storing cloud storage like this on external drives. Who knows if this is an Apple ploy to extract even more revenue out of their professional customers or whether it's laziness by the developers at Dropbox, OR that the cost of implementing an external storage system that will talk with Apple's API is far too costly.

 

I think what grates me the most is the complete lack of communication. We have bloody paid for this and yet we seem to be the last ones to know about what's going on.

 

The question is as you say though, is there anyone out there that does offer an external storage version of their cloud service and if so do they intend to move to an internal storage only solution because of the new (not new now) API filing structure. So frustrating and time consuming.

 

I just wish a company could be honest about what's happened and is going on and what can and can't be done.

Brooknei's avatar
Brooknei
Helpful | Level 6
2 years ago

The problem is both Apple and Microsoft own their OS's and cloud solutions. Any 3rd party Sync software using these platforms will always struggle to fully integrate or will need to work around any changes, especially if Apple/Microsoft quote it's a security requirement.

Long term the outlook for Dropbox and others including Google Drive looks bleak unless a regulatory measure is put in place to assist or if Open source Linux desktop takes off in a big way.

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