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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...
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?
Doesn't work. Only the alias file itself gets synced.
Same thing for a symlink.So... I was trying to get support and clarification on this but cannot reach tech support.
I am running dropbox 172.4.7555 with automatic downloads/updates turned OFF. As of today, I am running Mac OS 13.2.1 (22D68)
Having content on my external RAID array... well, it works just fine. And I like the older version of the software SO MUCH BETTER, the upload status icons are so helpful to my workflow. I don't know why dropbox wants to change it and make things work worse, not better. There's absolutely zero logic in that.
But I guess my biggest question is... if it doesn't work, then why is it working?I'm running the current version of both dropbox and Mac OS, and I can also still locate my dropbox on an external drive. I can't do this with any other cloud service (like Google Drive, or Box). What I'm worried about is this functionality suddenly disappearing with DropBox as well, which would significantly disrupt my workflow.
Would love to know the answer to this -- if anybody knows and can chime in it would be much appreciated. If one runs a version of OS pre Ventura, will this prevent the external hard drive sync being dropped?
I just switched to Pionner's Rekordbox professional plan that includes Dropbox unlimited.
I have a large music library, 3.5 tb, that is stored on an external ssd. This change is a no no as there is no way to store that in my internal ssd.
I will have to initiate a refund as this option no longer serves my needs.
Bye bye Dropbox,
Nope it's everything from Catalina onwards I think.
However a Reddit user came up with a possible workaround:
"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 needs testing ASAP and making it more prominent, if this works DropBox need to be contacting customers to tell them there is this work around as it is a pretty good fix for an otherwise unmitigated disaster for a lot of people.
Jon C.10 Thanks for the info.
So just to clarify: on the Apple OSX operating side there appears no way to avoid this as it's part of well established security updates they've been telling developers about for over a year; on the Dropbox side, there appears to be no way to avoid this as this upgrade will be rolled out automatically the next time the application restarts?
If this is the case, then it would seem the only (very limited short-term solution) would be to not restart dropbox on any machine that's running an external drive. Does that square with your understanding of the situation Jon C.10?
Quite apart from being untenable solutions (forcing users to store everything on a local drive; and/or not restarting one's dropbox application so as to avoid update), it would seem to me there's been a pretty major communication failure somewhere. Can we send the development team the links to how OneDrive solved things that studioj23 posted earlier? Is anyone on from Dropbox monitoring this? (Walter Hannah)
I wonder what drewhouston makes of all this...
