@Bluebicycle Let me enlarge on this. There was a time, years ago, when I found that Finder was crashing whenever I uploaded files exceeding a certain size, not especially large, but let’s say over 30mb. I received some very helpful advice from a tech who told me that Dropbox, OneDrive and pretty much every cloud storage provider had to operate their magic by loading their software into a Finder or Browser extension — and that it was a similar state of affairs in Windows. This created an inherently unstable star of affairs — which could be more dangerous than subjecting me to the occasional crash. Because, as certain types of “hats” know very well, a predictable crash can also be called an EXPLOIT, which provides a large hole that’s perfect for for the injection of malware.
I know this problem was patched in a hurry, because there was an update after which I never experienced the predictable crashes again. But I’m certain that, ever since, Apple, Microsoft and quite a few third-party cloud storage providers have been laboring into the wee hours to create a VERY stable, inherently stable API for online storage.
So I do agree with you that Apple did not create this new API for the purpose of selling internal storage, but to make MacOS, iOS and iPadOS more resistant to malware injection. Unfortunately, this also makes it much harder for cloud storage providers to support external drives. AND I agree with you that the ideal hardware platform for the online file systems like Dropbox or Sync is a RAID with dual redundancy, like the ones upon which you and I rely.
Let’s hope that Dropbox figures out how to support us sooner rather than later. While I’m rather comfortable with Sync.com, I’d much rather have an end-to-end encrypted Dropbox that supports external drives and, in particular, external RAIDs. Dropbox is unique among cloud storage providers in its creature comforts, and I’d rather have my cake and eat it too. make sense to you?
