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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...
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.
Re: external drives working for people now...
As it stands, unless something major changes this seems to be temporary. Until Dropbox makes an official statement otherwise, my understanding is that the versions of Dropbox which allow us to continue using external storage nonetheless still rely on older kernel extensions which Apple is depreciating. At some point Apple will make an update to the OS which will permanently break those extensions. That could happen with with MacOS Sonoma later this year. (I don't think anyone outside Apple really knows.) Hopefully Apple will hold off on making those extensions obsolete until they add some kind of external storage functionality to the Apple File Provider API. It makes no sense that they would offer the Mac Pro with PCI slots for raid storage, and not envision users ever wanting to sync and offline the files living on the raid.
For what it's worth, Dropbox support gave me this link to download the Universal MacOS version that should allow a fresh install using external storage. I have not tried it yet myself, as I'm reconfiguring my external storage and waiting for some components to arrive. Make sure to tell it not to update when it asks:
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-desktop-client-builds/Stable-Build-176-4-5108/td-p/691723
I recommend anyone affected by this make a feature request or bug report directly to Apple as well. Mention Apple File Provider API and external storage. Maybe tell them you're ready to buy four Mac Pros, but you need to know what their solution is to cloud sync and offline files on the raids you're going to install.
https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html
... and remember.. Dropbox has marked this entire thread as "solved" which is the HEIGHT of bull**bleep**.
In my case, my team are engineers, editors, and the clients are producers, companies. They can afford to have their Dropboxes local on their computers as their work is mainly pdfs, email, google docs. Via the browser, they can receive and push files to others. My clients don't need all of their Dropbox synced locally as they are not manipulating the media, just receiving and pushing it forward. Ussually they have a server somewhere, an IT person, and that main computer, server, has a local dropbox of "infinite space" for them to keep everything. But 99% of the users from the client side, have Dropboxes internally.
Now, if you are an editor, engineer, if you need to have hundreds of GB local at a moment's notice, then you are screwed because even if you have 2TB SSD internal drive, and you work with 5+ clients / projects simultaneously, you cannot possibly make that work.
Makes sense? That is why, I suspect, Dropbox/Apple, statistically, don't give a F. Because there isn't enough percentage of their users that will be seriously protesting over this.
psalcalThe longer they leave us to twist in the wind, the more I’m coming round to your ultra-skeptical way of thinking. The bigger the corporation gets the less they listen to us users. Doubtless this is why smaller providers such as Sync and pCloud DO listen.
But I have a question to pose for everyone who says they can’t leave Dropbox because they have clients with huge unlimited accounts, viz, What are THEY doing with their Dropbox folders? Or are they all on PCs?UKD I'm in a similar situation as fjazzfjazz . My clients use Dropbox, taking the decision to use it or some other service mostly out of my hands. Other than this (HUGE ISSUE) I've been mostly happy with Dropbox. I feel like I've taken a pretty deep dive into this issue now, mostly so that I can have some informed discussions with my client's IT people about it. I don't really know how other services plan to avoid this Apple/MacOS limitation in the future, when the old kernel extensions are truly obsolete. It seems like a roll of the dice any way you slice it. Best of luck to us all.
fjazzfjazz yes exactly this, the usecase for most people this changes doesn't cause any issues, for anyone with soem large files it's a real problem. one thing I'm not sure about, is this a mac only issue? as I have a PC sat right here next to me, can I just let that 'be drop box' do it all as it currently is? I use a lot of files from the PC anyway, redners and other video file content and the file speed is fine for me with a cat 5 cable straight between is and my mac.
dandid this is a Mac only issue. macOS 12.5 onwards I believe to be specific. See the details/explanation here
Just an FYI, on that page they stated end of May 2023 for rollout of updated Dropbox. We're almost at the end of June and still no actual updated from them. Shocking PR. Reckon at this rate that by the time they do a complete rollout would've been 2 years since Apple made the initial announcement of changes. Well done @dropbox 👍 nice to see you on the ball and at the top of your game.
dandid I recommend NOT sharing your Dropbox folder via Windows Sharing / SMB. I set this up myself, and after using it to add files for the first time had an unexpected mass deletion of files. My clients and I had to restore around 30,000 files. Thankfully, nothing was lost. Apparently everyone's local files were deleted instantly, and then it took however long for machines to re-sync over whatever connections they had at the time. It's not something I want to do again. I had two tickets with Dropbox support, one via email and another via chat (email support is like one exchange per day, and I was impatient.) Chat support told me SMB sharing is not supported. Email support didn't indicate as much, and thought maybe I had a drive error. Either way, it was a real PITA and did not make me look so great with my clients.
