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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...
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..
> …I emailed Appleinsider, 9to5mac and macrumors to try and get some heat under it. As of typing the first 2 have run the story.…
Please consider adding TidBITS.
This is BS and unacceptable from a major player in the cloud storage world. Sounds like Apple would like people to use iCloud storage more (and pay them more), but DB should easily be able to map their syncing to external drives.
I started a similar thread to this, and just spotted this one. Glad I am not alone.
I have 2 Macs - one Macbook Pro with 1 Tb SSD, and a Mac Mini with a 512Gb SSD and a 2Tb external SSD.
I have Dropbox on the external SSD for my Mac Mini.
My Dropbox storage is almost 3 Tb.
So this change is going to be horrendous for me!
Has anyone tried moving their user folder to the external drive? I don't see why that wouldn't work. I've not upgraded to Ventura yet because I don't want to lose access to all my files or run out of space.
If im correct, moving the user home folder to external storage means you cant start your mac unless that drive is connected.
My issue is that I have a laptop and sometimes I do not need the external SSD with dropbox connected as I have a mounted drive with cloudmounter in my desktop.... this situation is VERY complicated for me.
I think what you say is totally on point. We need to know if DB even see this as an issue, and something they would like to fix,
or as a 'non issue' for most people. I guess we are not most people.
A work-around would be great short term, but longterm not so much.
Spoke to "Customer Service" for 45 minutes. They repeated the party line of "this is Apple's fault, we have no choice". I asked to escalate SIX times, and the customer support person refused.
One more tidbit from my discussion with Support: I pointed out multiple times that Microsoft appears to have worked around the Apple problem; they completely ignored those comments.
Do not edit fstab on current versions of macOS, I have learned this the hard way.
Escalating does not help at all. Done it two times. The same copypasted answer each time...
I thought the questions would nestle below the posts. I'm not escalating.
