Disaster: Dropbox removing external disk support for Mac users :(

Please return the old title.

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marcosdutra wrote:

Please return the old title.

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I attempted to change it to

Dropbox Mac External Storage Blame Game NIGHTMARE — still unresolved after months of waiting!

but I may not apparently have the forum juice to change a subject line. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

beenyweenies I just used 1Gbe but this was physical connection and all the staff were on 1Gbe cabling and were sat in the office. Now everyone is at home and in different parts of the world so hence we only use the NAS as an archive as it doesn't get daily and minute to minute use. 

Everyone has different needs so I can't really comment on yours I'm afraid. I have moved all my day to day on to a different cloud company (sync DOT com) due to Dropbox's inability to confirm their status on the new implementation of the software, it's final impact etc etc. I don't think they've cared really in how this will affect their customers and then you have Apple who also, with their change in API, are putting a gun to their customers to upgrade to incredibly expensive internal drives. I've always liked Apples products but as time goes on it seems they are locking you in further and further in to their products.

I mean I can't even decide what Mac to buy these days. It's so **bleep** confusing and I've been an Apple user for nearly 30 years. Mac mini or Mac Studio? Mac Pro is off the charts expensive (I've owned several over the years prior to the new cheesegrater model) and then you need that large internal drive for Dropbox and then the price almost doubles. It's just crazy. All I see are stats for running either Apple products or benchtests for non-realistic usage. I want know how do these computers work with upscaling a photo (going from a 60MB file to 3GB file), how fast is it PDFing a 30 page indesign document with heavy images. Basic stuff, not how long does the machine take to render a static 3D image or if it can run 8 x 4K timelines and with real time scrubbing. Do I need 32GB Ram or wold 64GB be better. Is Dropbox going to suck all the memory from these machines too like it currently does? Not that I care about Dropbox for much longer.

I guess I am super frustrated these days. It seems that the customer is the last to know anything and then when told something and you ask questions you're told to shut up and accept it. Adobe did that a few years ago with one version of CC which was basically a 12 month customer bugfest. Open inDesign and it crashes. Put a ticket through and told to accept that that's what happens. 

I've gone way off topic, but this is the way of the world these days. However, when a company comes along and starts listening to customers then people will jump ship and that is what is happening to Dropbox. They don't see it yet because people still have their paid upfront subscriptions, BUT when these all start coming up for renewal and people don't renew, THEN they'll notice. THEN they'll start asking customers what can they do. THEN they'll realise that they royally f***d up, BUT until then they still have everyone's money. Me personally I'm not renewing my personal Dropbox and my Team of 10 licenses Dropbox. I'm pretty sure I'm small fry but when you start adding up all these small monies they soon start adding up.

We have our entire 6TB Dropbox synced on a 5 bay NAS - this is all our design files and videos.  The only sensitive files we don't want everyone to share are stored elsewhere and they're all documents so take up minimal space.

Smirker I'd be interested to know what they did because Dropbox doesn't make an actual app for Synology. They do however run a cloud sync on the NAS whereby you can sync your dropbox files to the synology NAS. I do that as a permanent localised backup of my files so you could technically do that. Not sure how people can connect in when not on the local network. I'd have to figure that out.

Just to add it gets more complicated when you have much larger files. My Dropbox was nearly 50TB at one stage!

ms25 Synology NAS has a package called Cloud Sync, and I imagine many other NAS systems have similar options. The problem is that this is just a dumb pipe that syncs all files. Because of this you would lose key features, such as individual user access/privileges, the ability to determine which files sync locally vs being available in the cloud, easy right-click file sharing with external users, etc.

beenyweenies that's kinda true but also not true. Synology Drive is now much better than it used to be but the downside is that it takes a large amount of effort to set it up with individuals and individuals access points etc etc. I use it for my company archive now of old files and to make my life easier I've just given my guys access to everything. Saves me a lot of headaches. You can do individual syncing of folders and files locally now but again it's much more difficult that say Dropbox is.

UKD Are you saying that you can now select which Dropbox folders/files are synced locally vs cloud with the Synology Cloud Sync? If so that's awesome, I don't own a Synology NAS yet, I was just going off of what I've read. I know you can manage users/file access with the local Synology tools, but as you said it's something many people would find to be not ideal.

Assuming you currently use a Synology system, how do you like it? I am firmly on the fence at this point, have many potential uses for it but just not sure about the read-write speed as I am a 3D artist referencing lots of large files into my projects.