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Forum Discussion
Moving Dropbox folder from ~/Library/CloudStorage
What is the reason for not allowing me to specify where I want to save my Dropbox files in Ventura? I don't have enough space in my system drive to keep a copy of my Dropbox files. And yes, I need ...
Hello goodnight.
I'm using the Ventura version, and I also had the same problem, analyzing my Logs, and observing the Forum messages, I performed a battery of tests.
1. Reinstall via homebrew (same error)
2. Manual reinstall (same error)Then I went to other levels of execution, when running as Root, it worked at first.
Puff, it dawned on me, permission was the problem.
I reset the permissions. (same error) lol 😞
I decided to run the binaries via terminal.
"cd /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/MacOS"
Then "./Dropbox"
However, I still got error.
Realizing that it had worked as root, and there were indications of permissions.
I decided to delete the root folders.
"/Users/elizeu/.dropbox"
"/Users/elizeu/Dropbox"IT WORKED.!!!!
Running as RootRunning as a regular user, after excluding local folders.synchronizingHe follows:
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi mrforged, thanks for messaging the Community.
With the new version of the Dropbox desktop application for Mac OS, changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by the OS itself.
It will need to be stored on the CloudStorage folder, and can't be moved to another internal or external drive.
If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.
This must be Apple's way of moving everyone away from Dropbox to iCloud. I don't have 2TB of internal storage. But it looks like Google Drive uses some kind of alias to have the drive folder located on an external drive. ??? I love Dropbox, but I may have to move to Google Drive. 😛
Jay wrote:With the new version of the Dropbox desktop application for Mac OS, changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by the OS itself.
It will need to be stored on the CloudStorage folder, and can't be moved to another internal or external drive.
What is the Dropbox company's advice to users whose Dropbox folder on an external drive is too large to be accommodated on the internal startup drive? (And who don't want to jump through hoops with Terminal workarounds.)
Are you saying that any files in excess of startup drive capacity will become online-only with just a link in the user's Dropbox folder?
Thanks.
That is what they are saying and they are blaming Apple for it.
From what I have been able to find, the requirement for the cloud storage provider's local copy to be stored on the local system drive is due to a dependency of a macOS feature or API called fileproviderd. This fileproviderd is a macOS-native method for accessing cloud file systems and it is what Apple's own iCloud drive uses. Apparently, Apple removed certain functionality from macOS that Dropbox and Microsoft's software (I am sure others as well) depended on to force them to use fileproviderd and it all began back in Catalina.
I know from first hand experience that the requirement to store Dropbox under ~/Library/CloudStorage/ can be worked around. Nothing is going to break. If I can do it with just a couple of commands from the Terminal, you can bet Dropbox could do that for you too if they really wanted to. Why don't they? The world may never know. At the very least, you know the requirement is a joke because if OneDrive can use any location on the local system drive to store its files, so can Dropbox. Why don't they? Another one of the big mysteries of life.
I only wish they didn't say things like "changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by the OS itself." That is an outright lie and does not look good on you, Dropbox.Hi what's the command so that I can skip the /library/cloudstorage way of filing. I'm a DJ, and have all my files saved in the original dropbox location. Now when I add the same music from the same folder it comes out as a duplicate with the file location changed. It's really screwing up my way of organizing my music
This so sucks! Does this change gives users more convenience or brings more trouble? For sure, it's the latter. I know it's MacOS's policy. This shows Apple is now away from what users really need and away from the spirit of Jobs.
It may be convenient in the sense that it's probably a bit faster for transferring files than it would be to an external but it's IMO it's massively more inconvenient for a number of reasons, such as smaller disk space and not being able to take the files with you on an external. I used to be able to use Dropbox on an external, have everything synced to that, and then I could plug it into my laptop which also looked for Dropbox on the external and everything would be in SYNC because the once true source is the external drive. I can't do that now. The only way to really do that would be if I used something like CCC (carbon copy cloner) to make daily sync backups to an external to keep the Dropbox folder and external drive in sync.
This happened a year ago. Why wouldn't Dropbox email its users to tell them this news? I found out by noticing recently that my main internal drive had 3g of 500 gigs left because Dropbox had reinstalled itself on the local drive and I had two versions running for months. Now I've paid for something useless because the main reason I use it is to free up a small 500 gig drive for application files. Now it's useless and I won't renew after being among your first customers from the beta around 2006/7. Now DB is spending money on F1 sponsorships??? WTF happened to the company??? This is nuts.
- Mark
Super User II
They did inform people - there were lots and lots of emails and popups on the web page about it with directions to read FAQ's about the upcoming changes: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes
