MacOS 13.0 Ventura, and Dropbox follows OneDrive in forcing the folder on the system drive

[Emanuele B.]

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 their site is a collection of anger, accounts of giving up on the platform entirely, praise for Dropbox for not going the same way.

Except it just did, it only waited until Ventura, and now my 360GB Dropbox home folder is supposed to fit on a drive that has about 160GB available, and I guess it was Apple's fault all along, but this is still a major malus to my having any use for Dropbox, I want a full hard copy of my files on local and not having to download them on the fly. This is a bummer.

[Emanuele B.]

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.

[treeandrew]

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.

[Andrew Parker]

Yep, it's huge pain, see my post here – https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Apps-and-Installations/DropBox-Unusable/td-p/635372

[treeandrew]

Hi All,

Just reporting whether the steps I took did address my original concern - the complete absence of the green "synchronised" indicators on my Dropbox folders under Ventura, and seeing whether relocating the Dropbox folder into the recommended Home Profile location would resolve that. Well the news is both good and bad ...

• Firstly, having moved the location of my Dropbox folder into the "recommended" location - inside my external SSD based Home Profile folder and re-syncing, the performance is great - despite the tedious requirement to resync completely.
• At first I thought that it hadn't fixed the sync indicators situation at all, but today, I started noticing that they were "re-appearing" - at the "leaf" nodes of the very substantial set of files I have - i.e. at the documents within the lowest level of the folder tree.
• Then as I progressed up those trees, with all files downloaded and local, the directories the indicators "percolated" up the tree.
• That is until you get to the very top-level of the folders directly under my Dropbox Folder ... they never seem to show a green indicator, even though every folder under them, is showing a green indicator.

So I'm not sure whether that is something that will resolve itself over time, as the sync indicators appearing sometime post the initial re-syncing did ... I'll wait and see. At least seeing the sync indicators at the lower levels is part way to what I was hoping to achieve.

[Walter]

Hey @treeandrew, could you send us a screenshot of the app's exact status as shown in your menu bar at the moment?

Is it 'up to date' or still syncing perhaps? 

[treeandrew]

Hey Walter,

No, it's been up to date for several days. And I note that the behaviour of the "sync" indicators appearing from the lowest level files seems to be quite inconsistent unfortunately. Here's the screenshot you requested.

Here is another view as I traverse the folder view this morning, which suggests that the "percolation" of the synchronised status "up the folder tree" has "stalled" somehow?

Note how the sync indicators are only present for some of the folders at a particular level, however if I select any of those folders not showing the sync indicators, all of the folders and documents below them are synchronised.

So the behaviour is certainly not consistent.

[Martin R.19]

Hello to the Community, hello Dropbox Staff,

I'm running Dropbox 160.4.4703 under MacOS 13.0.1. (Ventura) with OpenCore Legacy Patcher on a late 2013 iMac (27"). I also use Boxcryptor for the Dropboxfolder. That works all like charme while I'm now waiting for the expected changes by Dropbox, moving the Dropbox folder to ~/Library/CloudStorage. So far Dropbox did not force an update and if it's up to me that never needs to happen anyway... 😉

By the way, just to avoid any misunderstanding: does "~/Library/CloudStorage"  mean the library folder in the user directory or at "Macintosh HD/Library"?

Is there anything I can do to prepare in advance such as moving my Dropbox folder to the new location ~/Library/CloudStorage already manually?

What are your recommendations to make the change as smooth and less annoying as possible.

I use the Thunderbird mail client and have my complete mail directory in the Dropbox folder. That will need to get adjusted/re-linked of course.

I also use Windows 10 under Parallels 18 on same machine and use the Dropbox folder directory as network folder there. So that needs to get modified later as well.

In my Dropboxfolder I have a folder with movies (approx. 500 GB) but they are all marked "online only". Hopefully this will help to speed up the move.

Is it recommended to put all files on "online only" before starting the move? Will this make things going faster and avoid problems better? I mean, if all files are "online only" the local process of the move by Dropbox should go much faster as there won't be endless consequent synchronization involved. I prefer to do the synchronization later manually myself for only those files that I need offline.

Is it probably a good idea to delete my "older" Dropbox version, move the Dropbox folder directory to the new location ~/Library/CloudStorage (how to name the folder there?) and then install the latest version of Dropbox again, that will then use the new location?

Would be great if you guys at Dropbox can give me some recommendations.

Thanks & Regards,

Martin

[Megan]

Hey @Martin R.19, I hope you're doing well!

You had some very interesting, and on point questions there. As long as your app is up to date, the migration will be as seamless as possible. You don't need to follow any particular process on your end, or move the folder beforehand since our app will take care of everything.

What we want is to provide the best possible experience for all our customers going through this change, and that's what we'll try to do in your case as well.

In regards to keeping your all folders as online-only, that would do no harm, since it'll help the app re-index content possibly faster. We want to hope that we got it all covered on our end, and that's why we're working so hard on this every day.

If you have any questions, let me know.

[Walter]

A file or folder with no icon means that it has been opened either by double-clicking or through a third-party application and synced .

“Synced” means that any changes you made to this file or folder are reflected everywhere you access your files in Dropbox. While this file or folder is stored on your device, it can be made online-only by right clicking and selecting Make online-only. 

For folders, no icon means there is at least one available file in the folder, but no online-only files. There can also be files that are available offline in the folder.

An online-only file or folder can be made available by clicking on the“Online-only” icon.

Also note that if your computer is low on hard drive space, these files can automatically change to online-only to free up space from time to time.

I hope this clears things up a tad @treeandrew

[treeandrew]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for your reply, but I'm not sure your explanation either matches my scenario, or clarifies things for me.

I'm certainly not sure what I'm seeing is consistent with what you've described, particularly given I have other Macs with matching file structure / settings that certainly aren't displaying the same behaviour - all "green icons" are displayed as they always were - present on all files / folders at all levels. Of course, it may be that I need to a full / complete re-install on this Ventura based machine - tedious of course.

Having said that though, a number of years ago I moved to Dropbox because I found it more reliable than other cloud storage providers. Recent experiences, particularly given I'm predominantly, but not exclusively, a Mac OS user are certainly causing me to re-think that now.

Cheers,

Trevor