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...
KzDbx
Community Manager
Community ManagerHello everyone. Thank you for your feedback.
We understand that this is a significant pain point for you and your teams that rely on having Dropbox sync on external drives.
Currently, the File Provider API only supports your Dropbox folder in ~/Library/CloudStorage. We are actively working on a solution to support external drives on the updated Dropbox for macOS. While we work to implement a solution, customers who have their Dropbox folder on an external drive will not be migrated to the updated macOS experience. External drive support will continue to work as usual on your current experience.
We will keep you updated when we have more details to share.
Whilst I appreciate this issue hasn’t originated with Dropbox, it’s still their responsibility to paying customers to find a fix. This claim…
‘While we work to implement a solution, customers who have their Dropbox folder on an external drive will not be migrated to the updated macOS experience. External drive support will continue to work as usual on your current experience.’
…isn’t strictly true. I’ve migrated a MacBook 2018 system running Monterey with Dropbox pointed to an external drive to a Mac Studio 2023 (that can only run Ventura or newer) and it will only store Dropbox files locally. The drive isn’t big enough for my Dropbox, so I’ve had to bite the bullet, send the Mac Studio back to Apple for a refund and order a new one with a bigger internal drive (a costly solution!).
Dropbox told me they’ve no way to fix my account so I can still use Ventura with an external drive, despite offering this option in this claim. One that I know to be true, as the editor next to me is running Ventura with the Dropbox pointed to a RAID.
Very annoying and I’d like to know why customers are being treated this way!
‘While we work to implement a solution, customers who have their Dropbox folder on an external drive will not be migrated to the updated macOS experience. External drive support will continue to work as usual on your current experience.’
…isn’t strictly true. I’ve migrated a MacBook 2018 system running Monterey with Dropbox pointed to an external drive to a Mac Studio 2023 (that can only run Ventura or newer) and it will only store Dropbox files locally. The drive isn’t big enough for my Dropbox, so I’ve had to bite the bullet, send the Mac Studio back to Apple for a refund and order a new one with a bigger internal drive (a costly solution!).
Dropbox told me they’ve no way to fix my account so I can still use Ventura with an external drive, despite offering this option in this claim. One that I know to be true, as the editor next to me is running Ventura with the Dropbox pointed to a RAID.
Very annoying and I’d like to know why customers are being treated this way!
IS IT WORKING?!?!
I installed the latest version of Dropbox (177.3.5390) a couple days ago — and it's working, without kludges, on an external drive. (MacOS 13.4.1 on a Mini M2 Pro.) There is no longer a Dropbox folder in ~/Library/Cloud Services.
I had switched everything to Google Drive about a month back, and I decided to give it 60 days to see if 1) Drive would work for me, and 2) Dropbox would come around. I changed Dropbox billing to monthly to cut my losses.
If the issue has genuinely been solved, it's completely FKING NUTS that Dropbox hasn't said anything, but I guess it's consistent with their near-total lack of communication on the topic thus far.
We'll see if it holds. It's still functionally the best option, but I'm eager to know whether others' experiences match mine.
I'm on v178.2.763 and it is working for me as well. As an experiment, I opted out of the beta that included Apple's File Provider solution, and it reloaded with the older interface and an option to select a disk. I set this to my external and everything works as expected.
I am glad that this seems to be getting rolled back, but it sucks that I had to wait for everything to download again, which is going to really smart for people with huge amounts of locally available files.
I have an NVME drive 4Tb can be had for £180 now, and the disk write speed is as fast as the internal disk. just keep your mac studio and get an external NVME, then move your home directory to the external and your drop box will populate there. ?
Note that moving your entire Home folder to an external drive now comes with a firm warning that doing so can break your ability to log in. And indeed, if you poke around a bit, you will see hundreds of complaints of people upgrading to more recent versions of Macos being unable to log in to their accounts, access iCloud, the App Store etc.
I would be very cautious doing this, it used to be supported but it seems like Apple is moving away from that.
- Can’t move the directory that’s the issue. It’s locked to the system drive. I guess you could run the system from an external, but that would probably create all sorts of other issues.
You CAN move the directory, as part of the "home" folder associated with your login, it's just not recommended.
If you go to system settings > users & groups > CTRL-CLICK your username > Advanced - you are given the option to relocate the entire home folder which contains the cloud storage folder.
But as I said above, doing so now comes with a stern warning from the OS that it may break your login, and many, many people on the internet are experiencing that exact thing.
