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]

@Emanuele B. @Megan 

I found a solution to this problem using the SUDO command for Mac Terminal. 
https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstall

This worked for me.  I have a 4 T drive, which is partitioned into a 1T system drive and 3T data drive.  I have 1.9T of dropbox data. 

Using this command sequence allows me to identify a folder on my data drive as my dropbox folder. Very helpful and elegant solution.

[roverdb]

While Microsoft and Google may have been faster to switch over to the new Apple File Provider daemon, a bit of searching shows numerous complaints from OneDrive and Google Drive users in 2022 regarding CPU spikes and poor system performance all traced to fileproviderd. So the fact that Dropbox is dragging their heels or whatever may simply be a sign that they are more cautious than the rest and are talking to Apple and possibly waiting for these performance issues to be improved in a future Mac OS update rather than just releasing something that is going to run like garbage. Just a thought. 

[winfel]

I do not get it either. The "old" dropbox version seems to work just fine on Ventura so Dropbox is just throwing away its features of seemingly no reason whatsoever. It was one of the big things that the dropbox folder could be everywhere. I have a Mac Mini at home mirroring my Dropbox on an external hard drive, for example. What am I supposed to do now? Run it on Windows?

Please Dropbox, don't remove perfectly fine and working features just because the others did so! Don't become the others! Stay as you are!

[TRO_Berlin]

@discofuel so you are running on the latest Dropbox Version on macOS with Apples File Provider API and you have SymLinked your ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox Folder from your system drive to a different location (external drive?)?

In which order did you do your steps to make this work? We have 30 TB of files in our business dropbox, so the process has to be efficient 😄 Did you create the SymLink before clicking through Dropbox's Assistant on "migrating" to the new FileProvider API behaviour? Or did you perform the migration to the new Folder, and then "moved its content back" and created the symlink?

We have external Thunderbolt RAIDs with our Dropbox Folders on right now, so we need a solution for this... the alternative would be moving the home Folder, but our RAIDs are HDD RAIDs, no SSD... not sure how that will perform

[eriq c.]

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

I have sat here for the last two days now trying to BUDGET A NEW MACBOOK PRO from Apple just in order to accommodate this mess. What a mess!!!!

[TRO_Berlin]

Okay i just checked with a new Installation of GoogleDrive (also Using the new Apple File Provider API), and i tried to put a SimLink in ~/Library/CloudStorage pointing to a Folder on my External Storage. Does not work, only Errors when it tries to start syncing. I guess macOS recognizes the SymLink, the Content of the CloudStorage Folder is managed by the OS.

I guess the only working Solution would be moving the Home Directory to the external storage... this is a huge mess and so bad

[ncklcs]

@roverdb I really hope so, I'm holding off on the dropbox migration precisely because Microsoft lost me as a customer after OneDrive was consuming 100% CPU constantly and they did nothing in about 8 months - it literally made my Mac unusable and I had to pause OneDrive to do anything. Total nightmare.

[Michael S.197]

@roverdb @TRO_Berlin @eriq c. 

Did you try the SUDO workaround I mentioned above?  It worked for me like a charm on a new Venture MacBook Pro, still going great.

https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstall

[mon_white]

👍👍👍

[jhigh04]

When running the SUDO commands, will the path location still be "~/Dropbox" if I've already upgraded and dropbox is now located in "/users/{username}/library/cloudstorage/Dropbox"? If I'm reading correctly I need to replace "~/Dropbox" with the cloudstorage/Dropbox path, correct?