We're making changes to the Community, so you may have received some notifications - thanks for your patience and welcome back. Learn more here.
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...
treeandrew
Hi, Ventura definitely doesn't allow copying those folders. And the tech and I looked over your advice about secondary admin level, and he said it wouldn't work from there either - same restrictions would apply.
However, I finally did find a workaround here, proposed by the brilliant Walter :
https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstall
Thank you so much Walter!!!!
One question, I was still not able to back up Documents, Downloads and Directory.
Is there a sudo workaround for these?
Hi Michael S.197 ,
I just had a bit of a look at this issue at my end, and I might have some useful suggestions ... When logged in as my second Administrative level user, what you can do is as follows - or at least it works for me:
- Open a terminal window
- Navigate to the existing user's folder - normally this will be via: cd /users
- Your original user's folders will be in that location under the folder name used for your original user.
- Normally, you can change to that folder name, but can't access any of the folders below that. Navigate to that folder: cd {username}
- Now, what worked for me in terms of access, and being able to copy content from folders remaining under this was to change the ownership of the folders to the user I'm currently logged in under. To do this, use sudo the first time: sudo chown {second Admin user name} {folder name}
- You'll be prompted for the password of the secondary Admin user the first time, and then you can navigate to the folder whose ownership you've changed, and copy the contents ...
- However, I only tried this for a simple, single-level folder ... I didn't check if this worked for a deep folder with many levels, and whether changing the ownership of the top level fixes a deep folder structure ... I'll check that in a moment.
- I did check that you can change the folder ownership back when finished.
Hoping that might help ... as I said .. I'll try this approach with one of the more complex folders shortly.
Instead of moving all your files off Dropbox, one option is to use GoodSync. Back before Dropbox lowered their prices per GB years ago, I used GoodSync with Amazon S3 to create my own media syncing cloud with multiple external hard drives on a handful of machines across three buildings. GoodSync can use Dropbox as a cloud storage provider and selectively sync any folders to any device you can connect to.
I don't work for GoodSync, but I feel like more people should know about them. Hopefully this is helpful to someone.
