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.

[Michael S.197]

This is an absolute travesty.  I've just bought a new MacBook pro, and am only able to install a Ventura OS.  I bought my whole system, and spent a year writing a grant to do it, just for the capability of dropbox archiving a fully indexed research archive.

I am an academic, and have 3.0 Terabytes of scholarship and academic articles and manuscripts indexed, physically on my harddrive on my old rig.  This, naturally, needs to be kept on a partition drive, on my new rig, otherwise it's extremely unsafe.  I have to be able to search my archive at my fingertips - cloud computing ain't going to cut it - you don't provide the speed or accuracy, and it's no good to me in the cloud when I'm an some archive somewhere trying to compare manuscripts.

@Megan the "We must keep aligned" response is just placebo talk - it does nothing.  This is a critical issue.  My entire research archive and setup has been based around Mac's superior indexing for the last 9 years.  My career is on the line if I don't get my book out on time, and this has become a major obstacle.  I've been paying for my dropbox subscription for years for this very setup, competing for grants to fund it and battling with local institutions to prevent them forcing me to one drive.  This is not a "happy alignment" issue, this is a major, critical system change, and will cause a major system shift and departure from Dropbox.

I've tried to delete the dropbox folder in it's hidden pathname Root:/Users/~username~/Library/CloudStorage, but now Dropbox has broken and can't read the folder.

[Michael S.197]

@Megan @Walter 

I tried @treeandrew's excellent idea of copying the user directory over to my partition drive (I keep my 2nd drive internal to the machine - and yes, SSD only!  Hence major investment for a 4T drive to sync locally and in cloud).  Thank you, such an intelligent solution.

However, Ventura prevented me from copying the Home folder - all kinds of files were not given permission.  I used both Finder and Terminal. The syntax for Terminal was: cp -r <Home Directory> <Target Destination>

Finder error was simply:

Terminal gives much more information about the copy failures, which are sometimes "Permission Denied" or "No Such File or Directory" or "unable to copy extended attributes" &c &c.  But mainly "Permission Denied".  The majority of these were in the "Library" directory.

Were I back in my PC days, at this point I would have ripped out the SSD, stuck it in a USB hub, and copied using another system.  However, with macs that breaks warranty,  and I haven't got time. 
So I called Mac service support.  I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with them, and got ***Amazing*** service, really they are great.  Two techs walked through all of my trials, thought through multiple scenarios, we tried different ways to copy the Home folder, and to no avail.  He's raising it to engineers to see if they can't allow the Cloud Services folder to exist on another drive.

The idea that everyone is migrating to cloud-based only data is WRONG.  Not because of my personal feefees, but look at the market.  HDs on portable computers are now huge.  You can get an 8T SSD in the latest macs.  If we're carrying around that much data, it's so insecure, it's obvs we need it backed up on the cloud.  But not exclusively--otherwise, why 8T drive, and Dropbox indexing just can't cope (sorry but it's true - maybe for your emails or letters or whatever, but not for a research library).  Dropbox is good for backup, and great for sharing, but it ain't up to indexing.  

Apple will be getting back to me - unfortunately, not before I set off on 2 wk lecture tour where I need data with me, but I'll workaround.  I hope you at Dropbox are also pounding Apple with this problem!  For your loyal customers who rely on you!

[treeandrew]

Hi @Michael S.197,

Great news that Apple Support were helpful ... A little off topic, but I do remember the move of User Profile Home Directory quite a challenging process, but for my particular scenario worth doing, with a space constrained system drive, on a machine I really want to keep using for some time ...

I take your point about Apple's recent machines ...  I've actually got a relatively recent MBP M1 Pro - with I'm afraid only 1 TB internal SSD - and also noted that the internal SSD options go to 8 TB now. The last time I looked, but perhaps that was a while ago they went to 4 TB, which would probably be sufficient for me.

Out of interest I put together a price for a 14" MBP, with the lowest-end M1 Max, 64 GB and 4 TB - I may as well upgrade the CPU if I were to changeover - and here is Australia - it comes in at $6,800. Not sure I can stretch to that just at the moment. The upgrade to 4 TB is $1,800 alone here in AU. So yes, I must admit having purchased "off the shelf" models mostly in the past, because you can often get them discounted, I suspect my next purchase will be a custom build with a much larger internal SSD to ensure I avoid all these space constraint issues.

Good luck with you Home Profile Move!
Cheers,
Trevor

[Michael S.197]

@treeandrew how did you get your home folder to copy over?  Did you do it in Ace Detective, or an earlier OS?

[treeandrew]

Hi @Michael S.197 ,

And with regard to the problems you're specifically experiencing, can I make some suggestions - but perhaps you've done this already? Not sure.

• Create a NEW User on your machine - with Administrative privileges - if you haven't done so already
• Log in as that user
• Perform the copy of your old user's user profile directory as this new Administrative User - i.e. you're not copying while logged in as your primary user
• Alternatively, re-start your Mac in "safe mode" - I think that's what it's called - and log in as that second user - and do the same thing. The bottom line is you're trying to ensure that your primary user doesn't have any of the files in your User Profile Home directory locked or in use.

Does that make sense? Hope that might help.

[treeandrew]

Hi @Michael S.197 ,

Did you see the link I put in the earlier part of this thread ... It's quite a good guide, even if it refers to an older version of the OS, however under Ventura some steps look somewhat different now ... However the basic steps should remain the same ... I should point out however that my move was actually done under Monterey - prior to upgrade under Ventura - but It wasn't causing any grief there either, so I think everything should work just fine. The key things I mentioned in my earlier post - that I think crossed over with your question about steps to take are still relevant:

• Perform the copy while logged on as a 2nd Administrative level user - and KEEP that user as insurance in case anything really gets broken with your primary user
• The setting up of the alternative settings for your User Profile Home Directory have changed location slightly in Ventura, but are pretty much the same as they were in earlier versions.
• I should also say that some software - not much, but some - very poorly doesn't honour the redirection. For example, it will still try to look for files / documents at the "original" location of your profile such as <<system drive>>/users/documents/... or <<system drive>>/users/library/... and even some Apple applications, such as Photos and Music will need to be directed to the "relocated" Photos Library and iTunes Media Library, but it all works fine.
• The side bar in finder is initially a bit clunky, but is easily repaired.

Hope that helps.

[Michael S.197]

@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?

[treeandrew]

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.

[digitalchurch]

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.

https://www.goodsync.com/

I don't work for GoodSync, but I feel like more people should know about them. Hopefully this is helpful to someone.

[LvH]

Hi,

Regarding: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-faqs that is being constantly popping up as some sort of nagscreen.
This URL doesn't really explain *why* this change is supposedly necessary? I've tried searching this board but it's rather hard to get a result for "why" (or that is to say: the word is used *a lot*). 

As it stands, with the current version of Dropbox, my custom Dropbox folder is working absolutely perfectly fine. So it doesn't look like "Changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by macOS." but it's more like "Changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by Dropbox.". It's working fine as it stands, so would appear MacOS supports it just fine.

This also goes for "Storing your Dropbox folder on an external drive is no longer supported by macOS.". As it stands, it's working perfectly fine on MacOS Ventura with the current version of the Dropbox-app. So this also sounds like it isn't MacOS "not supporting it", it's Dropbox that's - for unexplained reasons (at least: not on the info page linked above) - dropping these critical features that are working absolutely brilliantly in the current version.

So I'm just curious: why is Dropbox removing all these very useful features, whom are evidently working just fine on Ventura? (And blaming MacOS as the culprit in the process?)

Hope the information page can make some clarifications, I don't understand at all now why these changes are being *forced* upon us whilst there doesn't seem to be any reason, at least none that are being explained on that information page, to drop these features.

Thank you so much for the information and/or updating the information page - and I hope Dropbox reconsiders these what appear to be unnecessary changes, because this means Dropbox will force me to start using another storage solution that does support external drives and custom folders. 😞