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
Disable automatic updates
How can I prevent dropbox from automatically updating itself? The new dropbox 3 has a very anti-windows-7 UI that I don't like, so I reinstalled 2.10. How do I stop dropbox from continually installing v3?
Tom_HSuper User alumni
You cannot disable updates.
The interface (indeed, very much inferior) is the least of the problems caused by this forced downgrade. There MUST be a way to defeat updating. May be worth experimenting with permissions in the Dropbox executable folder or discovering how it connects to download the new software. Maybe possible to block it on the firewall. Anyone any ideas?
James B.2 wrote:
The interface (indeed, very much inferior) is the least of the problems caused by this forced downgrade. There MUST be a way to defeat updating. May be worth experimenting with permissions in the Dropbox executable folder or discovering how it connects to download the new software. Maybe possible to block it on the firewall. Anyone any ideas?
If you use a firewall other than the default one with the OS you can create a rule to block autoupdate from connecting out. But you shouldn't have to do that. Hopefully they will add an option to disable it. I removed the app from my system as I really don't need sysncing anway so I can still upload files and share the link.
I've been holding it off by blocking dropbox's access to *.sjc.dropbox.com but its a very manual process since my firewall doesn't support wildcard domain blocking. At this point I'm just about ready to uninstall dropbox and switch to google drive, since it seems to have all the same features with a native windows UI.
@Mike Thanks Mike :) I will experiment with this. I am surprised that Dropbox implement uncontrolled updating at all. It is a very unprofessional approach, and is, of course, unacceptable in many commercial environments where any software change must be validated. In this case, version 3 is not an improvement, if only for the rubbish right-click behaviour and the icon. Thanks again :) James
Anyone found an answer to preventing updates? Both my computers have non sse2 cpu's. I appreciate that dropbox would probably want their software to run the best they can but forcing an update that won't work on types of pc's that can't handle it seems crazy (still many systems in circulation) If you can't disable the updates, it looks like it's time to try a new cloud provider until I can afford to upgrade my machines.
Aside from playing games with its 2000 connections, no. I gave up on it and switched to google drive. It has pretty much the same feature set and updates can be disabled by disabling the google update process. It's still not an option in the program but at least there is a sane way to stop updates if I wish, unlike dropbox.
I want disable auto upgrade too, because V3 don't work on my old Windows XP, last version which work correctly is 2.10.52. But unsuccessfully tries upgrade to v3 still and cause CPU load...
Hey,
Yes! Disable this auto update, now!!!!!
I am using a screen reader and it crashes with all of the builds in the 3.x series, so I can't use it, every time it updates I have to run the installer again, and that is not fun at all.
I also had a very very long discussion with the support about fixing this problem, but nothing has been done!
I hope we can do something.
Regards,
MarcDropbox just updated itself from 2.10 to 3.2 which was immediately apparent from the awful icons. Apart from the fact I don't like 3.2 I find it unacceptable that the Dropbox droid determines that it is going to update software on my machine without my permission, not even Microsoft is so arrogant. So its bye-bye nanny Dropbox as soon as I can arrange a more proffessional alternative. My first and sadly last comment...
Hack to stop Auto Update
rm -rf ~/.dropbox-dist
install -dm0 ~/.dropbox-dist
