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Forum Discussion
MacOS 13.0 Ventura, and Dropbox follows OneDrive in forcing the folder on the system drive
With Monterey, OneDrive implemented the new apis from Apple for online syncing that demanded its main location be a specific folder on the system drive. 8 months later, the MacOS community section of...
Megan
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi Emanuele B., thanks for reaching out about this.
Thank you for your feedback.
As with any operating system, macOS is updated regularly and with that we must keep the Dropbox desktop app aligned with any requirements set out by an OS.
Keeping aligned to those requirements ensures that the Dropbox desktop app will provide the best possible experience for all our customers in to the future.
We’ll be sure to pass your feedback along to our Product team.
Thank you.
This is an AWFUL idea. I work for a media company of nearly 100 people, all using Dropbox. We have a giant Dropbox of about 100TB (yes, TB...not a typo). Due to the large file sizes we use, we HAVE to use external drives and this change makes Dropbox unusable for us. I highly suspect we will be moving to a different service.
After all the money we've given Dropbox, this is a huge disappointment.
Dropbox was synching fine, and then I opted to relink it after moving it. Now Dropbox wants to store 100+GB in my Library folder? What the f? Anyone have a fix to this?
No fix, sorry, even if they were to allow a different folder it would really only be symlinks to the Library folder.
- We’re in the same situation here. Local drives are not an option for the storage we need. Unless we upgrade all our machines and pay thousands for large system drives. We’re working with film rushes and large movie files having to use the local Mac system drive is not an option for us.
Dropbox please push back on this restriction.The suggestion from the Mac community is that it isn't a restriction put in place by Apple, and that DropBox is implementing Apple's new File Provider Extension instead of developing their own API. If that is the case, then it is Dropbox who are leaving us high and dry.
We’re in a similar situation – albeit on a smaller scale. How did you end up solving this?
Hello, and thanks for replying.
Keeping aligned will ensure the continued existence of Dropbox on macOS, but as for the “best possible experience”, I mean yes, emphasis on “possible” as in “the one that is allowed to be”, and i realize Dropbox had limited pushback in this or we wouldn’t be in this situation, but I tell you, I will not spend thousands of euros to get a Mac with a larger internal drive just so i can run the cloud service that I’m already paying for fully local.
This is going to end in tears for a lot of people.
Any chance you can elaborate here? I'm on the latest version of Monterey. I only care about one subfolder (approx 80gbs) to be 100% offline. All the others can stay off my device unless specifically called upon. That's how dropbox is operating currently. Would this change if I upgraded to ventura?
I don’t know, do you have enough space on the system drive to hold these 80GBs and more? Because while I assume the client will keep having an option to designate files and folders as always available offline, the fact of the matter is that the cloud management API of macOS will have the last say and may offload some files to the cloud to make room for others if it deems it necessary, and if the experience with OneDrive which Microsoft adapted to this API already with Monterey is anything to go by, control over one’s files will become an uncertain thing at best. I just have a Windows machine to keep a local copy on both cloud services, because it’s clear Apple is so sold on the idea of files on-demand that they won’t let you have it on their systems.
This is an absolute travesty. I've just bought a new MacBook pro, and am only able to install a Ventura OS. I bought my whole system, and spent a year writing a grant to do it, just for the capability of dropbox archiving a fully indexed research archive.
I am an academic, and have 3.0 Terabytes of scholarship and academic articles and manuscripts indexed, physically on my harddrive on my old rig. This, naturally, needs to be kept on a partition drive, on my new rig, otherwise it's extremely unsafe. I have to be able to search my archive at my fingertips - cloud computing ain't going to cut it - you don't provide the speed or accuracy, and it's no good to me in the cloud when I'm an some archive somewhere trying to compare manuscripts.
Megan the "We must keep aligned" response is just placebo talk - it does nothing. This is a critical issue. My entire research archive and setup has been based around Mac's superior indexing for the last 9 years. My career is on the line if I don't get my book out on time, and this has become a major obstacle. I've been paying for my dropbox subscription for years for this very setup, competing for grants to fund it and battling with local institutions to prevent them forcing me to one drive. This is not a "happy alignment" issue, this is a major, critical system change, and will cause a major system shift and departure from Dropbox.
I've tried to delete the dropbox folder in it's hidden pathname Root:/Users/~username~/Library/CloudStorage, but now Dropbox has broken and can't read the folder.Hi Michael S.197 ,
And with regard to the problems you're specifically experiencing, can I make some suggestions - but perhaps you've done this already? Not sure.
- Create a NEW User on your machine - with Administrative privileges - if you haven't done so already
- Log in as that user
- Perform the copy of your old user's user profile directory as this new Administrative User - i.e. you're not copying while logged in as your primary user
- Alternatively, re-start your Mac in "safe mode" - I think that's what it's called - and log in as that second user - and do the same thing. The bottom line is you're trying to ensure that your primary user doesn't have any of the files in your User Profile Home directory locked or in use.
Does that make sense? Hope that might help.
I have had quite a few issues with the latest move in Ventura.
I have OneDrive running as well. When Dropbox moves the 'old' Dropbox folder to CloudStorage it takes over the OneDrive folder and syncs Dropbox to the OneDrive folder.
Oddly it doesnt change the CloudStorage>OneDrive folder name which causes even more confusion. So now both OneDrive and DropBox are merged and start to cross sync to both platforms. A HUGE MESS. Especially when I have to start deleting to separate them out again.
For some reason Dropbox does not create a new subfolder in CloudStorage. And needs to.
Glitch or are others finding this?
Backup My Mac is OFF both for OneDrive and Dropbox.
Ventura 13.2
Dropbox v166.4.2920
WOW, thanks for sharing. Very important to know as I meanwhile use OneDrive as well. I'm sorry for your awful experience. Something like this is exactly what I was afraid of and why I did not really want to wait for the move. Thanks to your info I can take necessary measures to avoid same drama here.
Todays playing has found the following;
If you delete OneDrive from CloudStorage so the folder is empty. Install Dropbox it creates a DropBox folder correctly.
Then re-install OneDrive and it will create a new OneDrive folder correctly in CloudStorage alongside the OneDrive folder.
OneDrive and Dropbox then seem to behave nicely.
So this is a DropBox installer problem and needs fixing. I think...
