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Forum Discussion
MacOS 13.0 Ventura, and Dropbox follows OneDrive in forcing the folder on the system drive
With Monterey, OneDrive implemented the new apis from Apple for online syncing that demanded its main location be a specific folder on the system drive. 8 months later, the MacOS community section of...
No fix, sorry, even if they were to allow a different folder it would really only be symlinks to the Library folder.
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
It’s something I have considered, along with, well, the more straightforward option (from a macOS POV) of actually booting from an external drive, but there was the rub again, it ought to be fast, even more than for your proposed solution, so a Thunderbolt 3 case for an NVMe unit, and that gets costly, to the point that I start considering giving back the M1 mini for when an M2 one is released and i go for the 2TB option…once again, this is piling money to apple upon the money for Dropbox and all of this because Apple deprecated a system that might not even break anything, but they’re such control freaks. Ah well, if you try it let us know how it goes, I’ll keep it in mind as well.
Hi There,
Yes, booting from an alternative System drive, so your home folder / location of DropBox folder is on that alternative / external / fast / larger drive certainly is a good alternative ... I guess my situation evolved over time, as the amount of stuff I have in Dropbox grew, and as the volume of stuff in my Mac Home Profile grew. So my solution was effectively a multiple-step solution.
And in answer to your other question, I actually did jump in and tried what I suggested in my previous post:
- Unlinked Dropbox,
- Signed back in, and
- Sure enough, the default location Dropbox suggested for the Dropbox Folder was in my relocated Home Folder on the external drive ...
So, I think that means it has been created in the "recommended / correct" location ... hopefully ... It's currently syncing down, which given my reasonable internet speed shouldn't take too long ... Obviously it's a bit wasteful having to re-synchronise, but I'll leave it now, and wait for it to complete. I'll report back whether it actually solves the issue I originally was concerned about - the absence of the sync indicators on the folders / files.
Yes been reading this elsewhere seems like the solution,
your additional reminder about local admin is REALLY important, and a great note to myself to remember.
Why is dropbox not reminding people this is the best work around. its all the larger users that it affects and we're likely to understand the moving home folder situation well enough.
I have an NVME drive in an external enclosure that didn't cost too much, works as fast as the internal drive in my macbookpro so definitely work seeking out, prices may be getting close to affordable for <2Tb by now too?
