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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...
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.
"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...
Thanks for checking that out.. the big question for me, sounds like it will backup from an external drive which is helpful, but will it actually SYNC to another external drive if necessary? That would be a killer workaround you may have found if so.
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.
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.
Okay it's been 15 minutes and my external disk Dropbox folder still doesn't update the new content.
Useless then.
Okay so it turns out external storage sync occurs every 60 minutes, and not in real time with like local disks. Fair enough. I didn't know what. That should be more explicit, instead of hiding this important information in the FAQs.
