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Forum Discussion
Disaster: Dropbox removing external disk support for Mac users :(
In case anyone's unaware... if you're a Mac user storing your Dropbox on an external drive, you'll shortly lose that ability. https://talk.tidbits.com/t/dropbox-drops-support-for-storing-files-on...
So for older systems on older OS's this will or will not happen? ie my main rig is on Catalina and I wasn't planning on upgrading it anytime soon. Will I need to find another solution for our 20TB dropbox?? holy moly this is a disaster.
Would love to know the answer to this -- if anybody knows and can chime in it would be much appreciated. If one runs a version of OS pre Ventura, will this prevent the external hard drive sync being dropped?
I just switched to Pionner's Rekordbox professional plan that includes Dropbox unlimited.
I have a large music library, 3.5 tb, that is stored on an external ssd. This change is a no no as there is no way to store that in my internal ssd.
I will have to initiate a refund as this option no longer serves my needs.
Bye bye Dropbox,
Nope it's everything from Catalina onwards I think.
However a Reddit user came up with a possible workaround:
"It is linked to your home user folder location. If you move your home folder to an external drive, dropbox goes with it. And for that matter, so do google drive, one drive, box etc."
this needs testing ASAP and making it more prominent, if this works DropBox need to be contacting customers to tell them there is this work around as it is a pretty good fix for an otherwise unmitigated disaster for a lot of people.
Jon C.10 Thanks for the info.
So just to clarify: on the Apple OSX operating side there appears no way to avoid this as it's part of well established security updates they've been telling developers about for over a year; on the Dropbox side, there appears to be no way to avoid this as this upgrade will be rolled out automatically the next time the application restarts?
If this is the case, then it would seem the only (very limited short-term solution) would be to not restart dropbox on any machine that's running an external drive. Does that square with your understanding of the situation Jon C.10?
Quite apart from being untenable solutions (forcing users to store everything on a local drive; and/or not restarting one's dropbox application so as to avoid update), it would seem to me there's been a pretty major communication failure somewhere. Can we send the development team the links to how OneDrive solved things that studioj23 posted earlier? Is anyone on from Dropbox monitoring this? (Walter Hannah)
I wonder what drewhouston makes of all this...
ommphoto you're welcome. I emailed Appleinsider, 9to5mac and macrumors to try and get some heat under it. As of typing the first 2 have run the story.
Your understanding matches mine - at some random point when we restart the app, we'll be forced to switch to the internal drive.
Two workarounds have presented themselves so far:
1. Move your user folder itself onto the external drive so ~/Library/CloudStorage is by definition on the external drive. Only a good idea if the external is a fast SSD, and fiddly with permissions by all accounts.
2. Edit /etc/fstab to make the external drive mount at ~/Library/CloudStorage. This is apparently supported by unix operating systems, although a bit over my head. I saw someone on Appleinsider got it working (see pic). We're going to test this as it is potentially the least disruptive route. Will it work properly though? Hard to say.
We really could use comment from dropbox on this..
