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Forum Discussion
clientreleases
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffBeta Build 148.3.4469
Thanks for using Dropbox! The desktop client is regularly updated with many improvements and fixes.
Features in this update:
We're transitioning to using GUIDs to manage the taskbar icon...
This Dropbox Beta is by far the worst “beta” product I’ve ever installed (and I’ve used many products in beta versions). I deeply regret having turned on the preference to install the pre-release versions. It’s not “beta”, it’s “alpha” at best. I installed it about a week ago, and it has completely wrecked my system.
- After installation, my ~/Dropbox folder became a normal folder. FYI, the total size of my Dropbox files (both my own, and those shared with me) is 43.34 GB, so it’s not some crazy amount.
- The app created a new ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox folder, into which it started to “put” all the files fresh from the cloud. There was no migration of the offline files, basically all data had to come from the cloud again.
- All files in ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox were “online only” by default, and the app made no attempt to make them offline even though in the app’s Selective Sync preferences, all folders (and “Select all”) is turned on.
- For the last week, “fileproviderd” has been running at 99.9% CPU usage without interruption (except if I force-quit), and it’s effectively wrecking all my work: Finder is mostly unresponsive or hangs, the DMG images I mount don’t show up, and in most apps, File > Save As does not produce a Save As dialog (until I force-quit “fileproviderd”, but then it reappears).
- The small cloud status icons inside ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox sometimes appear and sometimes don’t, regardless of whether the Dropbox app is running.
- The app never attempted to make the files in the new location offline-available, so I had to click the cloud status icons one by one (then they changed the status to "downloading", or use the "Make available offline" context menu item (then the icons didn’t change the status). “fileproviderd” instantly went up to 99.9%. After leaving the machine for 12-18 hours alone, “fileproviderd” was still at 99.9%, and only some of the folders inside the new Dropbox location were downloaded (made offline).
- The Dropbox app status always says "Syncing...", no idea what and how. (View Sync issues shows no problems).
- After the machine restart, Dropbox sometimes attempts to continue "Syncing", and sometimes not. In some cases, the main folder inside the new Dropbox location shows the "Not downloaded" icon even though ALL folders inside are "downloaded".
- Every other machine restart or so, the Dropbox app reports that it cannot connect, and my attempts to log in (using my Google profile) result in an infinite loop. Re-installing the Dropbox beta build helps with that.
- FYI, I have a MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) with 2.3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 and 64 GB of RAM, and the Speedtest app reports my internet connection to regularly have about 537 Mbit download and 39 Mbit upload speeds. At 60+ MB/sec, downloading 40 GB should take about 10 minutes, but the "syncing" process has so far taken 150 hours+ and it’s still not finished.
- It is an absolute disaster. I cannot use the machine properly, it’s beyond ridiculous. I will most certainly be cancelling my and my company’s Dropbox subscription and looking for alternatives, and I will be advising anyone with a sane mind to run away from Dropbox screaming.
Short-term, I’d love to get clear instructions how to uninstall this complete beta disaster and go back to the old “stable” method that uses the kernel extension.
Actually, I went ahead and uninstalled the Dropbox app and libraries completely (using CleanMyMac).
Did it work successfully - I now have 2 versions of my dropbox on my computer and concerned about removing either of them.
App has been stuck at syncing for over 24 hrs
Well, I simply removed Dropbox from my Mac altogether.
For the time being, I’ll keep the subscription (my personal one, and my company’s), and I’ll use https://cloudmounter.net/ to mount Dropbox as a virtual file system (which is slow but works), and will manually copy files. I do share files with my team via Dropbox but fortunately, it’s low-volume traffic — we typically update a few files a week there. We use Github for most work, and we’ve mostly used Dropbox to share larger files, with the convenience of quickly getting a public shareable link.But it looks to me that the new File Provider API-based Dropbox will be a disaster. Beta or not, I’m not talking about minor issues here — but the complete lack of usability. After having read all I could on this forum and in other places, Dropbox has also failed to adequately inform users about this change. There’s hardly any technical or in-depth information, just some platitudes.
It looks to me that in the past few years, Dropbox has bloated their product palette with things I’ve never needed, but they failed to keep the quality of what I once thought was their core business (or used to be). The company had $2 billion in revenue and over $335 net income. Seems to be that they should have spent considerably more on developers to work on the Mac desktop integration — rather than publishing horrific beta versions long after Apple has released their macOS 12.3. I know Apple has been difficult, they don’t give developers enough notice in advance about the changes they will do in their OS — yet they’ve announced the move away from kernel extensions in 2019, that’s three years ago.
I’ve asked my teammates to actively look for a different solution altogether, and I’ll be cancelling all our Dropbox subscriptions as soon as we’ve migrated the files to a new solution.
