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Forum Discussion
Jon C.10
2 years agoCollaborator | Level 8
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...
- 4 months agoHi 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!
Bluebicycle
Helpful | Level 7
The Dark Night, They sent that same reply to me only a couple of days ago. I’m sure they will come with a solution. If not there will be others like FileZilla, Cyber Duck, Mountain Duck.
We could be heading for 100 TB of storage, we only need 10TB at a time, but the headroom is essential.
Speed is not a factor, for steady media steaming. Local storage makes absolutely no sense to us.
We could be heading for 100 TB of storage, we only need 10TB at a time, but the headroom is essential.
Speed is not a factor, for steady media steaming. Local storage makes absolutely no sense to us.
millifoo
2 years agoHelpful | Level 7
I've been trying out MountainDuck the last couple weeks, and it's working ok, albeit I've gotten a couple (well, a few dozen out of millions of files) errors while trying to sync.
The biggest pain is that I have to re-download everything -- can't seem to get mountainduck to recognize the existing TB of data already local.
- shinbeth2 years agoExperienced | Level 13
"I've been trying out MountainDuck the last couple weeks, and it's working ok, albeit I've gotten a couple (well, a few dozen out of millions of files) errors while trying to sync.
The biggest pain is that I have to re-download everything -- can't seem to get mountainduck to recognize the existing TB of data already local."In my experience using MountainDuck really slows things down. These services slow things down and aren't as good as the native service they're linked to.And yes the re-downloading of 10TB+ of data is not an option, especially since it will be so slow vs. the native cloud service...- shinbeth2 years agoExperienced | Level 13
So it turns out I can sync my external drive in Preferences there's this option 'Manage my backups' > Dropbox Backup Beta and I can easily (apparently, I didn't try yet) sync my hard drive.
Shall I do it?
Will Dropbox remove this feature soon?
Why is it called Backup Beta when you guys say (in this thread) that this feature won't be available on Mac soon? Doesn't make sense.
Meanwhile, I received a notification on my Dropbox app 'The beta experience for macOS is available now - try it' which I didn't accept yet. Is this related to the former? Really doesn't make sense.
Not sure what to do now.
- shinbeth2 years agoExperienced | Level 13
So I turned on the HD Backup Beta feature and my Macbook M1 and it works.
Thanks for the heads-up guys, never used this feature before as I thought it wouldn't work very well. But it does now, so that can be useful. Dropbox really improved the Backup panel with all the disks available and many preferences which didn't exist back in the days. Makes it smooth now.
However I see two potential issues:
1. When I add additional contents (sub-folder and/or files) in the external disk folder, nothing seems to happen. I have to exit and relaunch Dropbox for the Sync to start. Is this normal? Does it wait for a few minutes before syncing? There's no manual 'Sync' button so I see this as a huge annoyance.
2. There's no Green mark in front of the external disk 'Folder' just the same way as it is in the local Dropbox folder. Quite annoying too since you don't really know when a particular external drive folder/file has been finished its sync.
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