Moving Dropbox folder from ~/Library/CloudStorage

You will not need to re-synchronize your files.

Let's assume you have your huge Dropbox folder stored on an external drive and it is accessible at  /Volumes/External/Dropbox.  You can replace that location with the actual location of your folder for the remainder of these instructions.  It will work just fine.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

I assume your Dropbox folder is located on an external drive that can be accessed at /Volumes/External/Dropbox. You should substitute that folder with the actual location of your Dropbox folder as you go through this guide.

If you have not already done so, make sure you quit Dropbox before you begin!

1. Open a Terminal window
2. In the Terminal, type 

sudo rm ~/Library/Dropbox && ~/Library/.dropbox

• Enter your Mac's password when prompted.  You will not get any visual feedback while you are entering the password
• Run Dropbox.  It will think it's the first time you run it.  Go through the setup.
• As the last step of the setup, you will be asked to choose what files and folders in your Dropbox account you want to keep a local copy of.  Select them all. Complete the setup.
• As soon as Dropbox loads, quit the app.
• Now go back to the Terminal: 

sudo rm ~/Library/Dropbox && ln -s  /Volumes/External/Dropbox ~/Library/Dropbox​

• To verify everything is good:

ls -al ~/Library/Dropbox​

• You should see a listing of all the files located at /Volumes/External/Dropbox  If you don't, go back to step 2. 
• OPTIONAL:  Install macFuse https://osxfuse.github.io/ 
• Now start Dropbox.  You are DONE!

I'm on Mac 13.2.1. I just got the notice to update my Dropbox, and it's now in the CloudStorage location. However, it was a little wonky. I have all my files saved locally, and in the cloud. But it set some to online only, etc... Also, I use Dropbox for my Apple Music library, and it was stuck on "syncing" as it doesn't like the "Automatically Add to Music" folder, so I had to set that one to ignore, and now no issues.

So what I did was I have a backup externally, and I made a backup of my Dropbox folder, and put that on the desktop (I don't sync the desktop). I then delete all the files in my Dropbox, and then made sure everything was up to date, then I added my folders back one by one. But since I deleted them on Dropbox, but didn't delete them permanently, the process didn't seem to have to re-upload the files, it just pulled them in from Dropbox, etc. I have about 100 GB, so the entire process took about an hour, from the time I had to figure out what was going on, etc.

But now my Dropbox is fine. The only thing is that by default now, Camera Uploads is online only, and if you make it available offline, it adds a green check. None of my other folders now have green checks by default, if I created them offline. And anything I drop in them from my Mac, they are available online, which I how I use Dropbox. I don't add files from other locations. So with Camera Uploads. I either have to manually download those, or set the folder to offline, but then deal with a single green check....

Whatevs, it could have been worse.. and I blame Apple for all this.. I should be able to have my Dropbox folder wherever I want it... but oh well.

I can't speak to the issue of moving Dropbox to an external device, but I have just dealt with the failure to sync issue and wanted to clarify a couple of things because it seems to me like the problem is tied to the way Dropbox tries to migrate you from the old setup to the new one. I've had to resend about 13GB of files and folders as a result.

I reset the app as follows from the Terminal:

1. osascript -e 'tell application "Dropbox" to quit'
2. rm ~/Dropbox
3. mv ~/.dropbox ~/dropbox.dot.bak
4. open -a "Dropbox"

The first line tells Dropbox to quit. You should find that ~/Dropbox (or ~/Documents/Dropbox) is a simple file that can be removed with rm. If you get an error then this means that it is a folder and you should not delete it but, rather, rename it (e.g. mv ~/Dropbox ~/Dropbox.bak). ~/.dropbox is a hidden folder containing various info about your account so (again) my preference is to move it, not delete it, until you know that everything is working.

After that, I opened Dropbox and it prompted me to authenticate and acted like I had never set it up on this machine before. So that seems to have resolved the issue as far as I can tell. Now I am just sitting through a massive resynching of my data.