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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!
phantom tides's avatar
phantom tides
Helpful | Level 6

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.

beenyweenies's avatar
beenyweenies
Helpful | Level 7
2 years ago

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.

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