MacOS 13.0 Ventura, and Dropbox follows OneDrive in forcing the folder on the system drive

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.

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This is an AWFUL idea. I work for a media company of nearly 100 people, all using Dropbox.  We have a giant Dropbox of about 100TB (yes, TB...not a typo). Due to the large file sizes we use, we HAVE to use external drives and this change makes Dropbox unusable for us. I highly suspect we will be moving to a different service. 

After all the money we've given Dropbox, this is a huge disappointment. 

Hello, and thanks for replying.

Keeping aligned will ensure the continued existence of Dropbox on macOS, but as for the “best possible experience”, I mean yes, emphasis on “possible” as in “the one that is allowed to be”, and i realize Dropbox had limited pushback in this or we wouldn’t be in this situation, but I tell you, I will not spend thousands of euros to get a Mac with a larger internal drive just so i can run the cloud service that I’m already paying for fully local. 

This is going to end in tears for a lot of people.

This is an absolute travesty.  I've just bought a new MacBook pro, and am only able to install a Ventura OS.  I bought my whole system, and spent a year writing a grant to do it, just for the capability of dropbox archiving a fully indexed research archive.

I am an academic, and have 3.0 Terabytes of scholarship and academic articles and manuscripts indexed, physically on my harddrive on my old rig.  This, naturally, needs to be kept on a partition drive, on my new rig, otherwise it's extremely unsafe.  I have to be able to search my archive at my fingertips - cloud computing ain't going to cut it - you don't provide the speed or accuracy, and it's no good to me in the cloud when I'm an some archive somewhere trying to compare manuscripts.

Megan the "We must keep aligned" response is just placebo talk - it does nothing.  This is a critical issue.  My entire research archive and setup has been based around Mac's superior indexing for the last 9 years.  My career is on the line if I don't get my book out on time, and this has become a major obstacle.  I've been paying for my dropbox subscription for years for this very setup, competing for grants to fund it and battling with local institutions to prevent them forcing me to one drive.  This is not a "happy alignment" issue, this is a major, critical system change, and will cause a major system shift and departure from Dropbox.

I've tried to delete the dropbox folder in it's hidden pathname Root:/Users/~username~/Library/CloudStorage, but now Dropbox has broken and can't read the folder.

Hi All,

Just reporting whether the steps I took did address my original concern - the complete absence of the green "synchronised" indicators on my Dropbox folders under Ventura, and seeing whether relocating the Dropbox folder into the recommended Home Profile location would resolve that. Well the news is both good and bad ...

• Firstly, having moved the location of my Dropbox folder into the "recommended" location - inside my external SSD based Home Profile folder and re-syncing, the performance is great - despite the tedious requirement to resync completely.
• At first I thought that it hadn't fixed the sync indicators situation at all, but today, I started noticing that they were "re-appearing" - at the "leaf" nodes of the very substantial set of files I have - i.e. at the documents within the lowest level of the folder tree.
• Then as I progressed up those trees, with all files downloaded and local, the directories the indicators "percolated" up the tree.
• That is until you get to the very top-level of the folders directly under my Dropbox Folder ... they never seem to show a green indicator, even though every folder under them, is showing a green indicator.

So I'm not sure whether that is something that will resolve itself over time, as the sync indicators appearing sometime post the initial re-syncing did ... I'll wait and see. At least seeing the sync indicators at the lower levels is part way to what I was hoping to achieve.