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Forum Discussion
Emanuele B.
3 years agoHelpful | Level 6
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...
Michael S.197
Collaborator | Level 9
I have been trying to assuage the doubts of this group by pointing you to a solution, which people's disbelief or opinion, rather than empirical trial, has seemed to muddy.
I've written here a number of times that I am running a version of Dropbox which forced me to move all my dropbox data into the "Users" folder, which at 1.3 T was untenable. This occurred because I bought a new laptop in November, and Dropbox installed an unwanted upgrade which was irreversible.
I used the Advanced Installation, here (https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstall), and was able to bypass the requirement to keep my dropbox folder in \Users, and successfully installed it at the root level of a partitioned data drive. Not within \Users. This has continued to work to this day.
pollen didn't seem to believe it could be true.
Fluk3 replied to pollen with an "opinion" that my experience is "wrong." I am impressed by his/her confidence to contradict described experience with their own "opinion," without attempting a comparable maneuver themselves. I can only state that I continue to experience that the workaround continues to work for me just fine.
Some, e.g. TRO_Berlin, have worried that the difference between our two posts, eg. mine and Fluk3's opinion, is confusing.
nessus42 then opines that using the solution might somehow revert the installation. I have not observed any version downgrade. I am currently running v167.3.4684
Fluk3 then opines into the dark that "Now would be a Good Time for a Dropbox staff to clarify the conversation" but doesn't invite any to the thread.
So, please know that the solution was presented by Walter , a professional Dropboxer, in this thread https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Apps-and-Installations/Take-Dropbox-out-of-Mac-Library/td-p/633050/page/2. Later in that thread, Hannah , also a professional Dropboxer, also advises the advanced install. Hopefully either of them, having been flagged, will now Hear the Call by Fluk3.
Notably, further down the line on that thread, the OP ShanaC states in December that she was forced into a reinstall.
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Apps-and-Installations/Take-Dropbox-out-of-Mac-Library/td-p/633050/page/4
I note, however, that her version at the time of posting was v162.4.5419. My current version (above in this post) seems to be more recent, and the Advanced Install continues to work. ShanaC are you still experiencing a problem, or were you able to resolve it?
I hope input by professional Dropboxers, and by the OP of the thread where I found my solution, is enough to convince people on this thread to call this problem "Solved," at least temporarily. It would allow so many people to stop wasting time and get on with their lives if this solution were spread more widely (which is my goal), because it is causing a lot of suffering and stress. It made me so grateful to find @Walter's solution, I hope others can experience the same sense of relief and satisfaction that they can continue with their orginal data architecture.
nessus42
2 years agoHelpful | Level 5
You may have gotten things to work the way that you want with the latest version of Dropbox, but personally, I would not trust it to continue to work in the future. The following is official documentation from Dropbox:
https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes
Note that it very explicitly says the following things:
- Changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by macOS.
- Your Dropbox folder will be moved to ~/Library/CloudStorage.
- Storing your Dropbox folder on an external drive is no longer supported by macOS.
If you wish to live your life on an unsupported edge, then more power to you. Me, there's no way that I'm configuring my Dropbox syncing to work in a way that Dropbox explicitly states that they don't support.
In addition to the above official documentation, my Dropbox preferences says:
- This version of macOS requires Dropbox to be store here:
/Users/nessus42/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox
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