MacOS 13.0 Ventura, and Dropbox follows OneDrive in forcing the folder on the system drive

Hi All,

Now I am replying to this thread, but with a caveat of "I haven't tried this yet", and I'm even a little hesitant to try it myself - but I probably will - and it is consistent with (I think) both a) Apple's preferred arrangements, and b) Dropbox's compliance with Apple's approach / APIs.

Firstly, let me say my current Dropbox installation is working, and is on an external, non-System Drive, and contains a very large number of "local" documents - well over 1 TB. So given I have a 512 GB iMac, clearly, it's been impossible to host the Dropbox folder on the System Drive for some time.

But also, my User's Home Directory itself has been getting problematically large for some time - as I'm sure many with a space constrained Mac will recognize. So, my suggestion is in two parts. The first of which is certainly not for the faint hearted. You can move your User's Home Directory to an second drive - and on a laptop, even to an external drive - as dangerous as that sounds - because obviously, you'll ALWAYS need that external drive attached to log in as that user ... AND that drive MUST be a very fast drive ... Don't use a spinning HDD, it must be SSD for reasonable performance.

I won't clog up this post with the details of doing this - which aren't trivial, and there's a few gotchas along the way - such as make sure you create a second Admin level user on your machine, just in case you were ever caught in a situation where your external drive couldn't be attached, and you needed to do something with Admin privileges. The following link contains a pretty good roadmap of how to do it. move-macs-home-folder-new-location-2260157

Having done that, the location of where Dropbox should offer to place your Dropbox folder should be - I hope - ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox - which - and this is the bit I haven't tested yet - should be under your newly re-located Home Profile Directory, on the - remember my earlier very strong recommendation, very fast external SSD you're using for it.

Once again, I can't emphasise enough, this is at this stage a theoretical solution to this issue at this stage - I haven't tried it, but I'm strongly considering it, because, I came to the forum looking for an answer to why Dropbox isn't showing the little green sync ticks ... And now I think I know why? The APIs it's using to do that have almost certainly changed, to conform to the way Apple is now doing it.

Of course, the stumbling block might be, that Dropbox ignores the Home Directory Redirection I've got configured - surely not - and tries to create a directory such as <<boot drive>>/Users/<<user name>>/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox ... Now that would be disappointing!

Interested in others thoughts on this.

Cheers,

TA

Pushing this topic again.

Moving your home directory cannot be the solution that will be accepted to be honest... A lot of large external storage devices are still HDDs, you would slow down your mac by moving the home directory to HDDs / a HDD RAID.

Any Update from the Dropbox Team on this? OneDrive has an official how-to / solution on their website for a few months now... 

Andrew Parker the old kernel extensions were what all providers used before and Apple had deprecated them and put their own api in place for the job. I fail to see how Dropbox or anybody else is expected to provide an api for what the system already provides, especially considering that it is a longtime Apple policy to reject whatever duplicates features already provided by the system…now it’s true that standalone apps may still do it, but if you want to have a store version as well they can’t be too different. More than that though, it’s simply possible that without kernel extensions you simply don’t get to sync files you update through finder, you don’t get to see icons for stata of synchronization, because the system doesn’t support that. I don’t know for sure, mind you, but it’s been the talk of all of 2022 and now suddenly it’s “Dropbox is lazy”? Doesn’t seem likely.