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.

[discofuel]

I'm not following how a symlink won't work. The actual path will be wherever you previously stored your Dropbox folder.

For example, if your Dropbox folder was previously on an external hard drive - e.g.

/MySSD/Dropbox

You would then create a symbolic link to that folder, and put it in:

/Users/{username}/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox 

The actual path is identical to your previous location. It's Dropbox that will use the symlink.

[eedis]

just tested this in photoshop and illustrator – when created in terminal (not as an alias), it does work.

this is new, this hasn't worked in previous versions. thanks for the note.

[MFrogley]

We’re in the same situation here. Local drives are not an option for the storage we need. Unless we upgrade all our machines and pay thousands for large system drives. We’re working with film rushes and large movie files having to use the local Mac system drive is not an option for us.
Dropbox please push back on this restriction.

[Andrew Parker]

The suggestion from the Mac community is that it isn't a restriction put in place by Apple, and that DropBox is implementing Apple's new File Provider Extension instead of developing their own API. If that is the case, then it is Dropbox who are leaving us high and dry.

[Martin R.19]

@Andrew Parker  that's a valid and good point obviously. Thanks!! I was already wondering why Sync.com and pCloud don't end up in the CloudStorage folder which kept me away from using both, cause I thought they both still need to implement the requirements by Apple. But your comment sounds much more logical as an explanation. Shame on Dropbox! Meanwhile Dropbox has still not started the move for my account. But I have now tested Google Drive. If Dropbox does same perfect job like Google did, then I don't expect any issues with the new folder structure. But if they fck it up, I'm gone. It does not speak for the people at Dropbox that they do everything last minute while they had years to do it. This means that these people at Dropbox have a mentality that I don't want to host my data with. Same now with the poor communication after buying the Boxcryptor technology. While Boxcryptor informs users right now that all accounts will be terminated by end of January, we have no news yet how things continue at Dropbox. If these guys at Dropbox would use their brains they would understand that they should have informed all their pro-customers about upcoming facts before receiving termination notes from Boxcryptor. Dilettants!

[Emanuele B.]

@Andrew Parker the old kernel extensions were what all providers used before and Apple had deprecated them and put their own api in place for the job. I fail to see how Dropbox or anybody else is expected to provide an api for what the system already provides, especially considering that it is a longtime Apple policy to reject whatever duplicates features already provided by the system…now it’s true that standalone apps may still do it, but if you want to have a store version as well they can’t be too different. More than that though, it’s simply possible that without kernel extensions you simply don’t get to sync files you update through finder, you don’t get to see icons for stata of synchronization, because the system doesn’t support that. I don’t know for sure, mind you, but it’s been the talk of all of 2022 and now suddenly it’s “Dropbox is lazy”? Doesn’t seem likely.

[Martin R.19]

Dropbox is most probably lazy or whatever because the changes were announced long long time ago. Google and Microsoft were at least much much faster than Dropbox.

So if it's true what you say now I really wonder what about Sync.com and pCloud. They have the finder file badges like Dropbox and the cloud folders are in the user directory just like Dropbox and not in -/Library/CloudStorage where they should be in the future... are they all ignoring Apple's changes? So far all works fine but may be sometimes Apple will shut the door finally? When installing pCloud you have to grant some special permissions to let pCloud create a virtual drive. May be that is a way to circumvent Apple's API thing...I don't understand much about that stuff...

[Fluk3]

Hey there, all.

I too am a deeply disappointed Mac/Adobe/Dropbox user and consultant for a few magazines, printers, agencies, etc.

I hate the loss of selective sync files downloading automatically when InDesign calls for offline linked files, and I hate the loss of the ability to move the Dropbox folder outside the Library folder. And I hate having to freeze updates to 12.2 indefinitely to maintain the current functions.

I have only one suggestion to those in need of an absolute path for multiple adobe/dropbox users.

If you used the Users/Shared folder before to make absolute paths, it occurs to me that the same function could possibly be replicated if the User's Home folders were all named the same.

Instead of Bob, Sally and Tom having custom user folder names, they could all use a home folder named "Design" or something generic like that.

Not ideal, and the logistics of creating a new user folder for each person and migrating everything (or just renaming the user folder - which could be problematic) would be a chore. But it could solve that particular problem if you think about it. And once it's done, there really is no downside to the loss of a home folder with your name on it. Unless that Mac is shared with multiple users who each need a unique home folder I guess. But that seems like a rare scenario.

If they all have the same user folder name, then the path is absolute (right down to the library). Just like when it was in Shared.

Maybe you all thought of this and decided it was not worth the hassle or that users would be unwilling, but I thought I'd throw that out there.

Meanwhile, I have to consider buying a 8TB SSD Macbook for many thousands more just to compensate for this hot mess.

[nessus42]

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@discofuel wrote:

I'm not following how a symlink won't work. The actual path will be wherever you previously stored your Dropbox folder.

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This won't work now. Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to sync what is on the other side of the symlink. Dropbox now syncs only the symlink itself. This is actually the correct behavior (and the lack of this correct behavior, until now, is why I haven't used Dropbox for the last decade), but in this case, the correct behavior, unfortunately, denies us a workaround to the newly introduced problematic limitation under discussion.

[discofuel]

I'm not talking about Dropbox following symlinks within the dropbox folder; I'm talking about the Dropbox folder itself being a symlink. Dropbox won't even know it's a symlink.