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Forum Discussion
Adding an external drive to iPad for “Make Available Offline” location
Can we get the ability to make an external hard drive the off-line location for Dropbox content in the iPad app?
- Walter
Dropbox Staff
Hi there RogueDog - thanks for posting on our Community!
I'm not quite sure what you'd like to achieve, could you elaborate a tad for me please?
For example, did you back up your external drive to Dropbox and you'd like the option to access it on your iPad device through the Dropbox mobile app and possibly make it available offline as well, or you had something else in mind?
If it's the latter, can you please describe with more details what you'd like to see implemented?
Let us know more and we'll take it from there.
Hi Walter - a pleasure to be here!
One of the key benefits for me with Dropbox App on the Mac, is the option in the preferences to make any drive, external or internal, the location for files that I "Make Available offline". This is probably the feature that pushes me to choose DropBox over all other cloud options.
With other providers, all offline files have to be cached locally before moving to external storage. I work in Film and Television, and I don't want those massive files constantly hitting my system drive before I inevitably move them to a working drive.
My workflow on the Mac is to have a drive that is dedicated to my DropBox App. This way, if I tell a folder to always be "Available Offline", then when large files are shared with me from clients, they are automatically made available locally as fast as possible, and even ready to work with if I should choose to work off my DropBox drive (dangerous I know, though sometimes I live that way in a given situation LOL).
I would like to have that same functionality on the iPad. Be it my entire DropBox, or just a portion of the DropBox. If I could use the same external drive even, that would be ideal.
Hope this has added some clarity, I appreciate my OP was a touch vague.
- Jay
Hi RogueDog, thanks for the clarification.
As it isn't possible to choose a local folder on the iOS or Android app as the location to store the offline files, since these files would reside only in the Dropbox mobile app, it wouldn't be possible to use an external drive on either mobile OS.
We do appreciate the feedback on this matter and we take all comments into consideration when improving the Dropbox app and services.
