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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!
UKD's avatar
UKD
Experienced | Level 12

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.

ms25's avatar
ms25
Helpful | Level 7
2 years ago

beenyweenies and UKD thanks for the info. I have a few Synology devices on a 10Gbe switch for storage and backup. Not having seen an official Dropbox app, I didn't think to look at Synology's own app. I've been swamped with work lately and haven't had much time to experiment with this (and I really messed up when I did!)

I moved most of my production to Windows machines back in early 2000, when buying a new pro Intel Mac didn't seem like a good idea. (Arguably, Windows is never a good idea... but that's another story.) I'd been waiting for the second generation of Apple Silicon before making the switch back to Mac. Now I've got these new machines, but a lot of the workflow I'd established while on Windows is proving to be difficult. At this point I'm using VNC to access a windows machine running Dropbox, where I move files to and from the NAS, and use the context features of the app there to copy links and paste them into Slack back on the Mac. It's a royal pain. Before leaving for a long weekend here I'm hoping to install the older version of Dropbox on the new Macs using some new external tb4 ssds just to get some of the old functionality back. If all else fails I can still VNC to a Windows machine. It sounds like Synology's app understandably wouldn't have any of the context functionality, so I'd still find myself going to another source (the dropbox website?) to grab links. None of this is optimum.

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