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Forum Discussion
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-...
This is a disaster for our my small business. We have 5 Mac Mini's with tiny 250gb hard drives, which run Dropbox on external SSDs (formatted to the AFPS system). I literally setup a new Mac Mini this weekend this way.
Now I am reading that Dropbox just won't work on them at all? So Dropbox has to use what little space is available in the 250gb internal drives??
If this is true...we will have no choice but to leave Dropbox and migrate to something else.
- We are in the same boat. We pay Dropbox thousands a year, I’ve just been talking to support about getting a partial refund when we cancel our account once we work out wth to replace it with :-/. Disaster is right.
Has this change already happened? I just checked one of our Mac Minis and the Dropbox folder is still on the external SSD.
- If you read my exchange with db tech support they say it’ll happen when Dropbox is next automatically updated which happens on system restart.
Unfortunately, it sounds like the change is being driven by Apple itself, not by Dropbox, which may mean that all alternative services face a similar limitation. If you continue to use Macs running Ventura or later, you may need to find another way to work or acquire machines with more internal storage (which a cynic might suspect as a reason for Apple to make the change).
So for older systems on older OS's this will or will not happen? ie my main rig is on Catalina and I wasn't planning on upgrading it anytime soon. Will I need to find another solution for our 20TB dropbox?? holy moly this is a disaster.
This is bad bad news, and may make Dropbox unusable for me, as well.
Anyone have any thoughts about sticking an alias in that new required location, that points to an external drive?
- One drive appear to have made a workaround. Major shame db haven’t. 😕
Could you kindly provide a link with information on how to make One Drive work as an alternative? Would love to find an alternative service but unable to find anything as of yet
From a Reddit user: "It is linked to your home user folder location. If you move your home folder to an external drive, dropbox goes with it. And for that matter, so do google drive, one drive, box etc."
This may be a solution - will require testing.Further exchange with Dropbox support:
Hello, welcome to Dropbox support. How can we help you?>Hi there, I wanted to confirm something>Hello there Jon, and thank you for contacting Dropbox support. My name is Jackson, and I will be more than happy to assist you with your issue, right away.>Hi Jackson.I understand Dropbox going forward will no longer support storing the folder outside of the user directory. This means by default we can't store it on an external drive.(OSX)>A bunch of us are discussing this here https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Storage-Space/Disaster-Dropbox-removing-external-disk-support-for-Mac-users/m-p/659876#M10309>That is true yes it will be under Library/Cloudstorage>Someone on Reddit has suggested a workaround could be to move your Mac user directory (your home folder) onto an external drive. This would mean that ~/Library/Cloudstorage would be on the external drive.Can you confirm if this would work?>From my understanding, you would like to know if moving the whole user folder, would allow the Dropbox folder to be placed on the external drive.>Correct.>I am afraid I do not have definitive information about this workaround. The Dropbox folder, and the folders of other cloud services will have to be under that folder. If the folder is on the external drive, reasonably the Dropbox folder would also be located there>OK so we'll just have to experiment. I have to say given this will mostly affect business users, the fact there's been little notification or suggestion of workarounds (only a note I happened to come across saying that our data would be moved without warning) isn't very professional.(if you wanted to pass that back)We shouldn't be having to experiment with hacks, when we use this as a serious tool.>Ok! I will forward your suggestion to the team. The restriction is set by the macOS>Thank you.>And for us to give an official workaround, we have to be 100% sure that it will not cause issuesFor instanceHaving your Dropbox folder on the external drive is already riskySince if it failsThere is a chance of file loss>Perhaps the team could look into the workaround I'm suggesting and check it for ruggedness, and inform the community (e.g. on the link above)? There's a bunch of us paying thousands of pounds/dollars a year looking to jump ship to OneDrive (who have a workaround) or similar, and we REALLY don't want to.>I will make sure to forward it to them. I know that Onedrive is using a workaround where they symlink the folder to that locationInstead of moving it there>We use extended version history to mitigate for disconnected external drives btw. It's not practical to store the amount of data we handle on an internal SSD.And I know lots of other users are the sameWe're doing 4-8k video production>Understood. I will forward your suggestion to them, since the team looks for user suggestions when implementing changes
Do you know of an alternative service that will allow it? I thought it was Apple's fault, so i'm wondering if we just have to all move to Windows. Yuck.
jahshwa I’ve posted about this previously, but I am now using a service called Sync.com, which is not perfect, but terrific for my needs. It’s based in Canada and committed to supporting users with external drives. One other user found their service too slow for his very heavy needs, but I’m very comfortable with them, YMMV, but you may want to give Sync.com a shot.
