You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
The Dropbox desktop application will no longer be supported for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on October 22nd
Congratulations Dropbox! You've just put the nail in the coffin of all W7 users who prefer not to be spied on and constantly used for data scraping!
Well done. If the constant scaremonger naggi...
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi Dibrom, thanks for messaging the Community.
We appreciate the feedback on this matter. As you've read in your email, Dropbox will be ending support for Windows versions 7, 8, and 8.1 on October 22, 2024.
We regularly release new versions of the Dropbox application with additional features, better performance, and security enhancements and these are not always compatible with older systems. Microsoft stopped providing security updates to Windows 8.1 in January, 2023, with Windows 7 and 8 being earlier than that date.
We are ending our support of the Dropbox app for these operating systems in October to keep our product offerings in-line.
Thanks for using Dropbox, and please let me know if there's anything else I can help with.
I have over $500K of 3D Scanning software & hardware that only runs on Windows 7 (I can NOT afford to update to an inferior Windows version...) Will the existing version Dropbox still continue to work if I do NOT do an upgrade (I'm only using Dropbox for file sharing/storage)
Sadly, no. The (massively complex and user onerous) "solution" to your dilemma you're about to face head on, is that what you're 'supposed' to do is spend huge $$$ buying an all new top range computer that can handle Windows 11, then you run an emulator version of Windows 7 inside that W11 environment so your hardware can still run your Windows 7 software that has no drivers compatible with W10/11.
So now you have not one simple OS to maintain, but TWO OSes to maintain, one of which is constantly spying on everything you do, just so you can keep doing what you were happily doing perfectly well with your previous 10yo reliable computer running just W7.
I'm sorry to say, this is the new world order or how things work. There are many examples. EV's are another one. First you needlessly create a massive problem through (in this case) enforced software incompatibility sold to the users through the blatant lie of "security" and "privacy" and any other nonsense you can come up with and convince people to believe. Then you sell them the all new, massively overly complex and pointlessly expensive solution that best case, gets them back to where they were before the fake problem that never needed to exist in the first place was foisted upon them.
QED: Dropbox sells its users the idea that for the sake of security and privacy and future feature enhancements, they have to force a compatibility upgrade that will leave 3.71% of their userbase behind. Then they tell us that's really not a problem because all we have to do is upgrade our computers to Windows 10/11, helpfully leaving out the fact that for most, this will mean a complete upheaval of their ENTIRE computer operating ecosphere starting with having to buy all new hardware componentry and in many cases building up everything brand new again from first principals. A process that could cost thousands of $$$ and take many months. At the end of it all, best case is that you end up with a computer setup equivalent to what you had before, except that its constantly spying on you and sending all your usage data back to microsoft to send you targetted advertising. This is the world Dropbox has revealed themselves to be complicit in creating and propagating. After knowing this, it is up to you whether the service they provide is really worth wanting to stay associated with them.
