Dropbox Location Change on MacOS 12.6

This is all quite possibly the most egregious failure of communication by a company. College students could study this thread as an example of how not to run a company and communicate with customers. It’s quite legendary as an example of exactly what not to do. 

The number of times someone from the company has copy and pasted the same answers in is laughable, despite so many people asking specific questions and consistently and repeatedly saying those “form” answers are not helpful. Constant repeated questions by the user base being ignored. It’s just staggeringly bad. I am just flummoxed, even just as a business owner who has to handle customer service and getting and responding to feedback myself, let alone as a Dropbox high end user. 

To Dropbox: We KNOW that macOS has implemented a change. Stop repeating this. We get that you’re trying to pass responsibility for this change on to Apple. But as I’ve said previously in this thread, there are workarounds that you could enact for power users, because other sync services are doing just that. AND you should answer the question properly. Is Dropbox ever going to implement a workaround or are we supposed to read the repeated statement that this change implemented by macOS making it not possible to store the Dropbox on an external drive is a permanent thing?

If so, just say that!! That way, everyone who needs to store and sync a large set of files (like the people on this thread, music producers, artists, photographers, videographers) can cancel and find an alternative and move on from Dropbox. Own it. If that’s your decision (dumb as it is) as a company, then state it plainly. Stop the constant deflection about macOS changes and own the truth that you are refusing to implement a workaround. 

Or perhaps you are working on a workaround. Then say that. And state an approximation for the development time. 

We also have to ask the question why a change in macOS would have happened without there being pushback by sync companies. Why isn’t Dropbox fighting the change? Those who store a Dropbox on an external drive are the top level customers who pay the most. Even for self protection it makes no sense for Dropbox to just accept this change in macOS. All the most lucrative users will all be bailing on the platform very soon. Leaving all the free and cheap users who won’t notice that their Dropbox has moved locations. 

Sounds like others have discovered sync.com as an alternative that has a workaround. Owncloud would be another. Even cubbit could be an option very soon. I’m sure there are others!!

Sorry Dropbox, but the way you are handling this is just bizarre, obtuse and totally moronic. 

@benjackson - Your message about robotic responses from Dropbox reps and the refusal to even acknowledge the questions asked is spot on.

I'd been politely ignoring the "updates" for 2-3 months, knowing it "might" be coming, but feeling confident that some methodology would arise to support external drives, despite Apple's changes (symlinks, whatever - just a workaround) Now, of course, the "request to update" is becoming quite annoying, and caused me to look at a thread like this, and realize that Dropbox doesn't even seem to be pursuing this, and the robots seem to mouth "we don't even know why you think this is an issue..."

Glad I finally looked to see what the real situation is, before Dec 30 when my paid for subscription renews, or actually will NOT renew now.

Thanks for fighting the good fight, as it at least informs me and others to move on.

I've been using Dropbox for at least a decade now and despite the price increases, never had complaints. I run the service on my Macbook and my Mac Pro. This change isnt much of a problem on my Macbook as the SSD is large enough to hold my entire Dropbox, but the MacPro5,1 is another story. On that machine, my Dropbox folder is on a separate internal drive and my system drive cannot hold the entire thing. Keeping some files to online-only is not an option. Thankfully, the change has only hit the Macbook and the Mac Pro hasn't been affected yet.

This was a rude awakening as I only found out about this change hours ago. I guess in some way it was a good kick in the rear. I'm already exploring upgrading the Mac Pro's system drive and testing competitors like Sync. I'm playing a wait and see approach to see how Dropbox will handle this, but also getting ready to pull the trigger to move to a competitor at a moment's notice.

I agree - this is not a good user experience at all. I upgraded to macOS Ventura about a week after it was released and am currently running Ventura 13.1. I'm also running the latest stable release of the Dropbox app (v163.4.5456) thanks to the auto-update. However, my Dropbox folder is still located in its previous location, in my '/Users/<username>' folder. I only became aware of this forced relocation of the Dropbox folder earlier today, when I was updating my Wife's MacBook after a couple of weeks of no usage and I saw the Dropbox dialog saying her folder was being relocated to the new default location.

I don't like the lack of communication about this issue, both from Dropbox and Apple. I also don't like the non-deterministic approach of the gradual rollout. I'm running the same version of macOS and Dropbox as my wife, but my Dropbox folder has not yet been relocated, and I don't know when to expect that to happen. I also noticed that my Wife now has some spurious notifications about "updated" files in her Dropbox activity list, all timestamped today at the time her folder was automatically relocated. That kind of thing makes me nervous, when important files are marked as "edited" when they haven't actually been changed (at least not by the user!).

This whole thing leaves a bad smell. I'm not happy about it, even though I can just about fit everything I need from Dropbox into my internal HDD with the use of the online-only option for things I don't need regularly. I'd like to see Dropbox take ownership of this issue, share some clear comms, address the specific questions already asked, and look into the phased approach to relocating everyone's Dropbox folder which is creating more confusion...

Perfect timing - the infamous message popped up a couple of hours ago and Dropbox started relocating all my files to the new default location. It seemed to work okay, but I now have loads of files showing up in the "Sync and backups" notifications as "edited" at the exact time Dropbox was moving everything. I just checked the "Recents" list in the web version of Dropbox and none of those edits are shown there, so I guess the erroneous file changes are just falsely reported by the local Dropbox app but don't actually exist in the central cloud storage. Still, it's not very reassuring to see loads of unexpected changes to important files. That should definitely be logged as a bug as it's happened on both our Macs here, so it must be pretty easy to reproduce.

I’ve tried this many times. Apple has thought of this and prevented it somehow. (Regarding suggestion to use symlink)

I'd imagine that Dropbox made a decision that the cost of losing the minority of users who have their dropbox folder on an external drive, is less than the cost to support this feature in future versions of Mac OS.

That said, there may be a workaround. You could potentially create a symlink in Mac OS to your external hard drive.

You can either use a command terminal or this app - https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10433/symboliclinker