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.

[eriq c.]

I don't know that I'm willing to terminal into anything or rewrite any kind of a path unless I'm sure things are actually working. I can almost guarantee there will be some sort of a workaround, officially, or an official update to address this issue - it's almost a company-breaking decision, in my opinion. How many of us have Dropbox syncing to an external larger drive because our internal M1 or SSD just isn't big enough? A number of thousands I would imagine!!

[Michael S.197]

The instructions answer this:

• Important: We assume that your Dropbox folder is in the default pathway. If you have placed your Dropbox folder in a custom location, replace all ~/Dropbox with the full location of your Dropbox folder in quotation marks. For example, if you have your Dropbox folder in the path /Volumes/DifferentPlace/Dropbox, you need to replace ~/Dropbox from the following instructions to "/Volumes/DifferentPlace/Dropbox".

[nessus42]

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@Michael S.197 wrote:

The instructions answer this:

• Important: We assume that your Dropbox folder is in the default pathway. If you have placed your Dropbox folder in a custom location, replace all ~/Dropbox with the full location of your Dropbox folder in quotation marks. For example, if you have your Dropbox folder in the path /Volumes/DifferentPlace/Dropbox, you need to replace ~/Dropbox from the following instructions to "/Volumes/DifferentPlace/Dropbox".

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It looks to me as if these are instructions for the old version of Dropbox, not the new version.

You can still run the old version of Dropbox on Ventura, but who knows for home much longer this will be possible?

[Fluk3]

I was thinking the same.

And this method with the old software would still lack the automatic sync of offline files when linked within an Adobe InDesign or Illustrator file.

And once the newer version of DB rolls out, this trick will likely explode in your face when the mandatory library location is enforced.

[Michael S.197]

I made this with a fresh installation of Dropbox when I changed computers in November, which prevented me from making a symlink. So I'm quite sure it's the new version. It took me two to three hours with applecare and a lot of digging around to find it, but this is what I came up with and it worked.  I suggest trying it first and then making that judgement call.

[Martin R.19]

@Michael S.197  As just published again by Dropbox in a statement (see below screenshot) and confirmed by my own experiences, you cannot force the switch to the new folder location. As long as you did never receive a corresponding notification from Dropbox and as long as your Dropbox folder was not moved automatically to ~/Library/CloudStorage, you are most definitely on the old structure, independently from the stable version number you use. Only joining as a beta tester will force the change of the folder location. 

source: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Apps-and-Installations/Recent-Dropbox-Mac-12-3-Monterey-support/m-p/...

[eriq c.]

I did notice a BETA tag on the Dropbox logo on my specific app shortly after reading about this "issue" and I'm still not convinced that this was the right way to handle this dramatic a change. I don't even remember checking BETA auto-install anywhere in the app. Still, this is a horrible update and change if implemented. I'm curious what everyone else's experience is with this - did you know this was a supposed BETA install? I just came home and noticed my entire Dropbox system wiped out.

[eriq c.]

To clarify, my Dropbox wasn't wiped out. It was just "re-referenced" to the OS-drive level structure mentioned in this thread and all of my files had to be "rereferenced" and relocated. Upon searching the forum and google for this particular issue, I was shocked to find the plans to not support external drives. So here we are. To Martin, who pointed out the BETA software, I just noticed the option to opt out of BETA in the app and I'm re-connecting the drive now.... but not without a huge re-install and re-copying everything OUT of and back into the original Dropbox folder. !!! Thank you for pointing this out!!

To repeat, I hope Dropbox isn't going to implement this change. What a nightmare!!!

[eriq c.]

One more thing - on a REFORMAT of my hard drive last nite, I did a fresh reinstall of Dropbox. And, actually, it did install the latest version on its own. So there wasn't any action on my part to disallow the overwriting of the original fresh install (which was the NON-BETA version.)

Anyone else have this issue - it would seem this change is, in fact, being implemented/rolled-out without having to opt-in to anything.

[Martin R.19]

question is how or where you downloaded the installer. Only here you can decide whether you install the latest stable version or a beta one. If you do a regular download from the website, you (hopefully) won't get a beta version.