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.

[TRO_Berlin]

A colleague already got the notification to update his dropbox directory to the User Library, another colleague and me did not get the notification yet (all of us are based in germany / berlin).

I am not really ready to trust the "advanced reinstall method" in the future to be honest. It is a huge amount of data we have to reindex / or even redownload when support for this advanced reinstall method may end (i am speaking 20TB+, not 1TB).

Let's hope for an official statement and maybe official (and long time supported) method just like OneDrive gave their users (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/inside-the-new-files-on-demand-experi...)

We are now thinking about switching to MountainDuck as a Client for Dropbox, which handles offline storage differently and (i guess) will not be forced to switch its behaviour of storing files in the futures

[ShanaC]

I am still having this problem. 

I'm now at Dropbox v166.4.2920 and - after doing the advanced re-install -  I'm still getting the "Upgrade Dropbox to use it on the latest version of Mac OS" alert. 

[georgedavies]

I have had quite a few issues with the latest move in Ventura.

I have OneDrive running as well. When Dropbox moves the 'old' Dropbox folder to CloudStorage it takes over the OneDrive folder and syncs Dropbox to the OneDrive folder.

Oddly it doesnt change the CloudStorage>OneDrive folder name which causes even more confusion. So now both OneDrive and DropBox are merged and start to cross sync to both platforms. A HUGE MESS. Especially when I have to start deleting to separate them out again.

For some reason Dropbox does not create a new subfolder in CloudStorage. And needs to.

Glitch or are others finding this?

Backup My Mac is OFF both for OneDrive and Dropbox.

Ventura 13.2

Dropbox v166.4.2920

[Martin R.19]

WOW, thanks for sharing. Very important to know as I meanwhile use OneDrive as well. I'm sorry for your awful experience. Something like this is exactly what I was afraid of and why I did not really want to wait for the move. Thanks to your info I can take necessary measures to avoid same drama here.

[georgedavies]

Todays playing has found the following;

If you delete OneDrive from CloudStorage so the folder is empty. Install Dropbox it creates a DropBox folder correctly.

Then re-install OneDrive and it will create a new OneDrive folder correctly in CloudStorage alongside the OneDrive folder.

OneDrive and Dropbox then seem to behave nicely.

So this is a DropBox installer problem and needs fixing. I think...

[georgedavies]

Correcting typos

Todays playing has found the following;

If you delete OneDrive from CloudStorage so the folder is empty. Install Dropbox it creates a DropBox folder correctly.

Then re-install OneDrive and it will create a new OneDrive folder correctly in CloudStorage alongside the DropBox folder.

OneDrive and Dropbox then seem to behave nicely.

So this is a DropBox installer problem and needs fixing. I think...

[TRO_Berlin]

@georgedavies that's horrible. This has to be fixed ASAP from Dropbox! 

@Megan this bug georgedavies mentioned has to be forwarded to the dev team (as well as all the feedback here on the new CloudStorage Directory)... 

[georgedavies]

To add to the woes.
I have 4 machines all syncing Dropbox. 1 has OneDrive as well that has been the discussion below.
This machine stores a local/offline full copy of all DropBox and OneDrive data.
OneDrive has done a flawless job of syncing and storing a full copy of the drive to the machine.
DropBox has had the issues already mentioned and now I am at the stage of rebuilding the full offline DropBox to the machine. It’s been quite a tedious process and far from efficient.
The overnight DropBox download to convert from online to offline has taken an eternity and has resulted in a patchwork of on & offline files. I have been doing a variety of DropBox and machine re-starts, manually going to the online files and clicking to make them offline.
It’s a bit of a mess and has consumed a lot of time.
I’m still not there and this has taken several days of my life I won’t get back.

I am more astonished that Microsoft has their app working very well on an Apple platform and DropBox hasn’t.

[TRO_Berlin]

Any Update on this topic?...

I checked out MountainDuck using my external Storage and it works fine, it even has the feature to create share-links from the right-click menu. Looks like a very good alternative to the official dropbox client.

Still no update-notification to the latest version for me though

[Markus M.7]

@dom burgess 

We’re in a similar situation – albeit on a smaller scale. How did you end up solving this?