We're making changes to the Community, so you may have received some notifications - thanks for your patience and welcome back. Learn more here.
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...
"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."
Absolutely not for professionals with high-speed contents such as heavy 8k files, Kontakt librairies and so on, external SSDs as of today are not as fast as internal SSDs built my Apple (they are 'expensive' for a reason). It's a total issue. For instance Sandisk v2 Pros (2/sec) will load Kontakt librairies faster than older optical drives but still not as as fast as the latest Apple technology provides with internal SSDs (anyone could understand why). Same goes with Ableton Live which indexes all your librairies samples etc. if you don't use the fastest internal SSDs it will somewhat introduce a slightl latency from time to time (when searching 8TB of data in my case) which is annoying enough for me and slowing down my process and creativity so it's a no go. And the fact that you have to search through different devices is creating confusion. Perhaps you have too little data or work on the amateur side of this business and that's no issue for you. But for people who make money out of it we don't have time for such inconvenience.
Relying on external drives is rubbish:
1. because your data isn't stored in a single place, it makes it difficult to search in a single unit (out of question for me)
2. even external SSDs aren't 100% reliable as something could break (the cable, the USB part, or get stolen etc.) so it makes much more sense to centralize everything on a single internal SSD (and fastest one) and then back this one single data storage with an equally large external SSD for TimeMachine (or two of them, even better, which you can alternate every day for maximum safety - keeping one hidden in your house and one with you on your keyring), plus of course cloud service > Dropbox as another layer of real-time backup
3. it doesn't make sense to share company content from various external disks and sync it to a cloud, unless it's a high-level Enterprise plan level (thus Dropbox offering unlimited capacity at this level) that none of you here use, since large companies have their own data management system already and this requires an investment that is not necessary when already having enough space locally.
"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? "
8TB is enough for me now and soon Apple will start releasing 16TB etc. on their MBP and Pro lines which will be more than enough for my lifetime.
Raids are absolutely not an option again they start introducing latency and it's quite sketchy to start relying on cloud storage for such complex systems. They're not so easy to set up and maintain by the way, I've been into this - except again if you go Enterprise level which is not my case and not the case of 99% users in this discussion. So I prefer to keep things the simplest with local data and the fastest internal SSD drive.
"Again, this is a dropbox issue and a problem which dropbox needs to solve. Google Drive has solved it."
When this thread started I was compassionate with you guys but now I tend to think Dropbox is doing the right thing. It needs to stop offering ridiculous external storage sync (so unreliable, how can you guys trust this) and start FINALLY offering more storage in the Pro plans so that we can sync our local data conveniently. Pro Dropbox users are neither Basic users with ridiculously low needs and neither Enterprise users with ridiculously high needs (such as 1000TB needs and Entreprise level architecture).
And by the way Google Drive sucks unfortunately, if G Drive was as good as Dropbox I would have left Dropbox already for G Drive, since they offer 30TB for a very cheap amount of money. Unfortunately, only Dropbox provides such a perfect real-time indexing and cloud service without any limitations (except that stupid 3TB plan limitation but that's a different type of issue).
We Pro users need 10 to 20/30TB Dropbox plans and by the way DO NOT want to migrate to Business/Enterprise plans with 3/5/10 mandatory users. Just a single user I work alone and if I need to share things with others I simply use the sharing options/folders which are totally fine as they are today.
"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."
The only hard requirement for me is Dropbox finally getting in the 21st century and stop offering only 3TB (+1TB only extra) Pro plans, which feels pretty much like what we needed 10 years ago considering our computers, drive and contents.
..and again, Dropbox is doing a major disservice to us by marking this thread as "solved" when it is decidedly NOT.
Bonus: this benchmark written in december 2022 comparing differents SSD Raid speeds (APFS) they cannot exceed 1'800-2'200mbps in write/read (at the very best...)
https://larryjordan.com/articles/compare-speed-differences-between-2-3-and-4-drive-ssd-raids/
And also consider that Thunderbolt (as of today v3/v4) has its own limitations too so until Thunderbolt v5 sees the light of day I still maintain external drives as not being an option for professionals in need of high-speed transfers equivalent to those provided by internal SSDs on the likes of Apple M1/M3 (forget the M2 its crap, they had to slow down the internal SSD speed by 15-25%).
https://larryjordan.com/articles/thunderbolt-may-not-be-as-fast-as-you-think/
A few things on the topic of internal SSD drives shinbeth .
The problem with your line of logic is you assume people work like you do. We don't.
Some people record lots of live musicians playing together. Some people record one track at a time. Some build beats and rap on top of them. Some use a ton of bandwidth-hogging string libraries, while scoring to video. Of course, for the latter purpose, you are right that large internal drives are ideal for that audio playback. BUT your one size fits all perspective is not a real world thing. An internal 8tb drive is completely foolish for most of the rest of us people. For the film scorer, well, there's your use case. But the rest of the 99% of us? Hell no, my friend.
In an article from 2009, the internal hard drive of Macs were able to easily play back 255 tracks at 24/96k (the most tracks Logic supported at a time). Those were SSD SATA3 drives. Those are indeed faster than a thunderbolt 4 drive, which does top out at 2mbps. I suck at math but you can figure out how many tracks the 2mbps SSD could record and play back. But let me say for all but a few of us, that is PLENTY. So the mythical 8tb internal drive is complete overkill.
Also, I have never once in my professional life experienced a single recording studio where they recorded audio from a band (multitrack) to the system volume. That's not for performance anymore but it is for redundancy reasons. If that single source of failure goes down the entire studio goes down. That is a non-starter.
In the video world, if you are working on short form content, by yourself, one project at a time, then maybe that 8tb internal drive will do you. In the corporate world where I work, we work on 100TB RAIDs. We work on multiple projects at a time, we pass them among roles (rough, color correction, sweetening, etc). We DON'T hand the machine off to each person. They instead access the SAN over fiber or 10gbe. 8TB is NOT enough for serious work on longer form video with multiple streams of 8k video. In this case your internal 8TB drive is woefully inadequate.
Also for many of us the idea of putting all our media on our boot drives is a TERRIBLE idea if there is a drive failure. In your world, you would absolutely have MULTIPLE machines with 8tb internal drives with the same drive image AND back them up together daily in case of a failure. With the above mentioned RAID systems, they are designed so multiple drives can fail and you don't lose data. Your mythical 8tb system is a very bad idea in that world.
Certainly my friend if you edit for YouTube and you do fewer projects at a time, you have great media management and you work by yourself, your internal drive option seems like a terrific solution! But unless you have a backup system you can immediately switch to in case of a failure or OS problem, you are walking on thin ice if you are a pro working on a deadline. The important thing is to NEVER think one size fits all.. somehow you are the expert and know everyone else's use cases and workflows? No offense, but it's clear you do not.
At any rate.. it's clear from this thread that there are a great many of us who disagree with you. Respectfully, it seems very foolish for you to come into this thread and tell us what we SHOULD be doing, even if in many cases we are professionals who have been doing this kind of work for over a decade.shinbeth Why do you keep posting about Raids & SSD speeds, & how you like huge internal drives?
This has nothing whatsoever about what is being discussed, which is about Dropbox removing external drive support.
Any drive *other* than the boot drive is now classed as an 'external drive', even if its in fact Internally fitted on a Mac Pro
This is something many of us rely on. If that's not you, kindly leave this thread to those of us who wish to keep this feature.
Please help keep this thread on track.- psalcal - your assessment is spot on. There are many of us who require DB to be on external drives when media is local. The logistics to manage video assets within a DB folder located on the OS drive does not make any sense when you have a 50TB+ of cloud storage.
shinbeth - please don’t jump the gun and assume your needs are the same as everyone else. Perhaps take some time to read through the case studies here beforehand. shinbeth of the cloud storage providers, I have worked professionally with Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive so far. I even tried to see if iCloud was workable (no). For my money Dropbox is the best fit. Do you have something you like better you could recommend?
I'm a little pissed at them right now because the latest update has stopped my folders from syncing (the update which forced the internal drive storage). But still.. they are the best I've found.I'm not going to go back and forth shinbeth . I made a case based on real world experiences. You do you, I'm OK with that.
I can tell you have not worked in a fast paced pro audio or video environment. There is no world where waiting for a Time Machine machine restore during a critical edit is acceptable. Ever. And that assumes you have no hardware failure and can simply wait for that Time Machine backup to restore from that spin drive backup. That is just not a thing in a pro environment.
Those RAID drives are backed up. There is a complete backup strategy in place involving LTN, cloud storage, and offsite storage. Again.. if you worked in that world you'd understand.
That you don't get it just shows you haven't experienced that. That's OK, by the way, if it works for you I think it's wonderful, but that you cannot see why it's not a universal fix just shows you don't have experience in those other worlds. No offense meant. Be well, friend.shinbeth The way I reading things here, KyleKoch did nothing to try and tell you what YOU should do. We are simply disagreeing with your assessment about what is a good workflow for us.
Why would you feel the need to come here and tell me, someone who has worked for over a decade in pro audio and video editing how I should be doing things? Especially when it's quite apparent your experience is not in the same environment.
I'll say one more time, I think the workflow you mention is TERRIFIC for you, bud. I would never criticize your way. I just gave you a bunch of real world reasons why your workflow doesn't work. It's OK if you choose to do otherwise.I've tried 8 different cloud services including those you mentioned, and Dropbox both personally, professionally and even as part of working for larger companies that were using Dropbox too.
Nothing comes as good as Dropbox in terms of usability, that's a fact. So we have to stick to it.
But I wish they could finally upgrade their product it's been a while since it's been the same I see no new features and upgrades.
Ideally yes it should support any kind of external sync. It should offer more space. So let's keep pushing them into the right direction and they will finally become the ideal cloud service we all wish they were.
"This has nothing whatsoever about what is being discussed, which is about Dropbox removing external drive support."
Dropbox is removing external drive support because they realised it's no longer needed.
End of thread. Solved. You're welcome.
"Any drive *other* than the boot drive is now classed as an 'external drive', even if its in fact Internally fitted on a Mac Pro"
???
You're crying in the wilderness bro. None of what you terribly wrote added value for Pro use.
"Also for many of us the idea of putting all our media on our boot drives is a TERRIBLE idea if there is a drive failure. In your world, you would absolutely have MULTIPLE machines with 8tb internal drives with the same drive image AND back them up together daily in case of a failure. With the above mentioned RAID systems, they are designed so multiple drives can fail and you don't lose data. Your mythical 8tb system is a very bad idea in that world."
Absolutely not since like I said Time Machine makes a perfect clean copy of my entire system on two different external SSDs I keep in different locations + Dropbox at all times that's a winner here I can never encounter a failure. You say that 4 different systems (Mac + Time Machine on two different external SSDs in two different locations + Dropbox) could fault at the same time? Lol bull**bleep**. Also RAID systems can absolutely fault or burn or else and you'll be screwed. My solution is safer than yours, cheaper and I don't wanna go into RAID systems. Your mythical system is indeed a very bad idea in this world.
Just wait for the next-gen 100/200TB SSDs to come to market (https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/worlds-first-200tb-ssd-is-nearly-here-but-you-cant-use-it/) and all the problems will be solved, no need for your crap system. Having all your data on your Mac boot drive is a non-issue with Time Machine. I'll spend the 20k for 100TB drive if need be, plus another 20k on two external 100TB SSDs if my storage needs increase. Unless you work as an Enterprise with a dedicated system yes your RAID system can be interesting but I'd rather go with Dropbox Enterprise then (and yet those RAID systems would be need to be duplicated in many locations so that in case of burglary, fire etc. you're not **bleep**ed). Anyway 99% of us don't need such a hassle and we're better off with fast local SSD + Time Machine + Dropbox.
Same here please don't assume your needs are the same as everyone else. Please take the time to read all my former comments before jumping to conclusion. You guys on this thread are a minority of users and you're making it big like your life depends on it lol whereas Dropbox was never meant to be syncing external drives in the first place. They only introduced this feature a while ago as a favor and I see no reason to further extend it since it doesn't really make sense.
