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Jon C.10's avatar
Jon C.10
Collaborator | Level 8
2 years ago

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...
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  • BenDBX's avatar
    BenDBX
    4 months ago
    Hi Everybody,
     
    We’re excited to share that external drive support for Dropbox for macOS on File Provider is now available for testing as a beta feature. This is available to some users today and will be available to additional users on a rolling basis. In order to be eligible to test this feature, please follow the instructions in this Help Center article. 
     
    Keep in mind that participation in beta programs is subject to the certain terms and conditions. There are certain additional participation requirements:
    • This beta is only available to US-based users
    • You must be on macOS 15 beta
    • You must have an external drive that is APFS formatted and encrypted
     
    Please let me know if you have any further questions!
psalcal's avatar
psalcal
Collaborator | Level 10

Buying an 8TB internal drive is ALSO not a real solution for most of us.  

 

And you greatly overstate the need for speed when it comes to drives.  I have for 5 years done music on Minis including my current M1 mini, and I use an external drive for all media and samples.  My dropbox folder is on that same external drive (SSD).  It is completely a non-issue.  

 

One might make an argument that video users might need this, but most video users I know use 10gbe or fiber and external RAIDS, not internal storage, at least in the corporate world.  Even 8tb is not enough for a a lot of video projects, and what then?  

 

Again, this is a dropbox issue and a problem which dropbox needs to solve.  Google Drive has solved it.  

 

I appreciate people trying to detail possible workarounds as I know people's hearts are in the right places, but let's be real about those solutions.  They are not real workable solutions.  Dropbox and any usable cloud service MUST support moving of directories to external drives.  That's a full on absolute requirement.  

..and again, Dropbox is doing a major disservice to us by marking this thread as "solved" when it is decidedly NOT.  

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