Dropbox Location Change on MacOS 12.6

Megan With respect, how is that copy-and-paste job supposed to “help”, exactly? It comes across as though you didn’t read or didn’t understand what was being discussed. It actually seems a bit insulting to us users.

Is the Dropbox team completely oblivious to the problem raised here in this thread?

How about, have someone knowledgeable explain why the change was necessary (if it, in fact, was), and also tell us if there is any hope for those of us with less than 2TB internal storage to continue keeping a full local sync of our 2TB Dropbox account? That’s all we are asking for.

With respect again, Megan, how are you going to “pass our feedback along“ if you don’t seem to understand what it is that we’re discussing? We’re not offering “feedback” as much as we’re asking a question about the future usefulness of the product itself. Clearly, no one that Dropbox has assigned to interact with this forum is able to answer.

I don’t think that any of us here are interested at all in the Dropbox desktop app. I think we’d all prefer if it wasn’t even there. We use Dropbox passively in the Finder as we always have. We have large, paid Dropbox accounts, and the majority of us have internal drives on our Mac that are smaller than our 2TB Dropbox storage. We have always been able to keep our entire Dropbox synced locally by way of an external drive. Now we're being notified that a change in this functionality is being forced upon us, and we are asking whether or not this change is permanent, so that we might be patient for some amount of time with Dropbox to develop a workaround before we cancel our paid Dropbox accounts and look elsewhere.

If you want “feedback,” here’s some feedback: There is a lack of explanation and transparency from Dropbox as to why this change is necessary (if it truly is). There needs to be more clarity to your customers. There is also a clear lack of expertise demonstrated by their representatives in this forum.

Agree again with mf88.

They (Dropbox) keeps dodging the question of WHY this change is necessary and if it's permanent?

I'm sure Dropbox-team know very well that this is going to be a "big thing". Are they forced to do it? If so, for what reason? Is it a technical issue?

(I just can't be...it's 2022...really?)

Or perhaps you could point us to the MacOS documentation that says you are not allowed and are not able to make the content elsewhere on the machine?  That seems to be the implication from Meghan's statements although we often find that such broad statements are interpretations.  Which is why, I think, people have been asking both "why" and "what does the Dropbox team plan to do" about our need for the old features (described earlier).

That doesn't answer any of my questions and is in fact a copy of the article that was linked in the update window of the desktop app.

So, no that doesn't help at all.

I had Dropbox from its earliest days and paid for a 2TB plan. I've now cancelled Dropbox because it has become worthless due to the location change (lack of support for external drives) and the fact that Dropbox has also become intrusive (almost malware like) to the MacOS system itself. The MacOS "Screen Capture" function has been taken over by Dropbox, despite me having said "NO" to using Dropbox as its destination. The only way to restore the default "Screen Capture" mode is via using the Terminal application.  I now use Sync.com. A little slower, but that is because, unlike Dropbox, it uses end-to-end encryption.

I was unaware of this issue, until i last night was hit with the same prompt y'all is dealing with.

my entire teams work structure is now utterly crippled and i'm literally here in the studio in the weekend pulling out my hair trying to navigate the damage this has created so far.

so many broken links, so much data just mixed up now between client computers and our edit computers. it's such a mess.

is there really no update from Dropbox side? this is a costly move for many of their more pro clients.

jeeesus christ.

Where is the "Dislike" button?

The answers are consistent - we can't use alt drives for dropbox.  This is a CORRUPTIVE "feature".  See following...

I had an alias down into my Dropbox (and placed this alias into the finder sidebar) before it got moved.  However, now that the Dropbox got moved, my alias is no longer pointing to anything in the active Dropbox space.  Worse yet - I've been saving files (using my alias) for at least a month and just now discovered this alias no longer syncs with my moved-Dropbox anymore!  Now I have two different locations of duplicated (yet different in versions) files all over the place!

WHAT A MESS!

How can I fix this? Or should I just delete Dropbox and go to Box or something else?

How can I force the Dropbox location change?

I want to update to macOS 13 and want to do the Dropbox Location Change first.

I have Dropbox version 161.4.4923 installed.

However, I am not offered the option to do this and my files are still in the old location.

Dropbox v161.4.4923 was automatically installed on my Macbook Pro under Mac OS 10.14.6.

My Dropbox folder is still located in my home directory, so it is NOT in ~/Library/CloudStorage.

I have a 2 TB Dropbox Personal Plus account with some 784 GB of data of which 337 GB on the

local disk. 

My question is:

Can I now safely update MacOS to 10.12.3 and later versions? Will the migration of the Dropbox

folder to ~/Library/CloudStorage happen correctly, despite v161.4.4923 already having been installed

on my system before the Mac OS update?