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.

[Walter]

Hey @LvH, thanks for posting on our Community and providing your thoughts on this. Your feedback has been noted in our system. 

It seems that you haven't opted in the beta for Mac OS users, so you haven't received this update yet on your device. 

If you’re interested in joining our private beta, you can turn on early releases while you can also keep up to date with what is supported on macOS 12 and higher by viewing this article.

The updated Dropbox for macOS app has been developed to adhere to the requirement as set out by Apple therefore this update was introduced to ensure the best possible experience for our Mac users long into the future.

I hope this information helps and please let us know if you have anything else to add or ask. 

[CA_Boarder]

So is the ability to move your dropbox folder to an external drive going to be added in a future version or is this function going to be completely removed.  If so, I am going to cancel my subscription.  My primary boot drive doesn't have enough space for my dropbox folder so I need it on an external drive.  Please let me know if this is not going to be a supported function, so I can find an alternative to dropbox that does support external drives.

[eedis]

Same here, I was about to introduce this to our business and now i read this.

Is there any fix to it?

[Emanuele B.]

I cloned my internal drive onto a 4TB NVMe drive I stuck inside a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure and set it as the startup drive. It was over 500€ Burt still far less than returning the current Mac for a discount on a new one with a larger internal drive. It works, I can now have everything in the intended folders as per the official apis, which really means I don’t really get to decide that everything stays there, as it’s the system now that decides that based on its inscrutable evaluations. That’s not just Dropbox, that’s every cloud service on macOS from now (Ventura) on.

[eedis]

Thats a solution to make external drives work.

For us, moving DB to external drive was so that relative (user) paths become absolute (volume) paths.

Any workaround for that? Are you using DB by yourself?

[Emanuele B.]

Yes, I don' use in collaboration. Absolute paths don't seem likely, unless Apple is willing to relax their API I'm afraid.

[Andrew Parker]

Anyone know how this can be raised with Apple? Sounds like we need to put pressure on them.

[Emanuele B.]

Their feedback page in their community under the macOS subject. And a lot of hope they aren’t just trying to oust all competing cloud services from the platform.

[discofuel]

You should be able to fix all these issues with a symlink.

Create a symlink as described in this article - https://tommcfarlin.com/new-dropbox/

You can use this app if you don't want to use the terminal - https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10433/symboliclinker

You can set the folder to wherever you want, external drive, etc.

[eedis]

symlink won't fix this issue

in third party applications (e.g. adobe) it's following the file back to its actual path.

thats why third party sync clients (e.g. maestral or mountainduck) are not working either.

afaik they use symlinks, too.

it'll always be where the file is located / cached.

so far only google drive worked to not link to the cache location but its also different technology and i don't know if it has changed since the enforcement of the cloudstorage.