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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!
ArthurPix's avatar
ArthurPix
Collaborator | Level 10

UKD BTW, the Dropbox feature that you're emulating with your NAS — using it to share a single 10T folder with your team — seems to me much safer than turning your NAS into a permanent Dropbox. In fact, this is the sort of task for which a NAS is perfect.

 

NOTE: Personally I'd sleep better with the shared folder also backed up on an external drive,  or at least protected on my NAS with a redundant RAID. 

psalcal's avatar
psalcal
Collaborator | Level 10
2 years ago

ArthurPix I have a few synology NAS devices at work and have used them in the exact opposite way.. they were used to store media which was then backed up (using Synology backup software) to cloud based services.  

It's interesting this conundrum.. I have very much liked the option of just relying on dropbox for all the hard work, but at the same time I'm tempted to take it on myself.  

 

Thanks for sharing your knowledge.  

  • UKD's avatar
    UKD
    Experienced | Level 12
    2 years ago
    ArthurPix psalcal I’ve used Dropbox as my main storage but then backed up those same files on my Synology NAS. I also have connected to the NAS a hard drive to back that data up too.

    When you lose data once you don’t do it again and I learnt, backup, backup, backup. Failure to do so and you put your livelihood at risk.

    When I was in the office I used my many NAS’s as the main storage and backed them up to Dropbox. Now the whole company works in the reverse as we all work from home now. Funny how things change.
  • ArthurPix's avatar
    ArthurPix
    Collaborator | Level 10
    2 years ago

    UKD Your story sounds very familiar to me as well.

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