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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...
This is a disaster for our my small business. We have 5 Mac Mini's with tiny 250gb hard drives, which run Dropbox on external SSDs (formatted to the AFPS system). I literally setup a new Mac Mini this weekend this way.
Now I am reading that Dropbox just won't work on them at all? So Dropbox has to use what little space is available in the 250gb internal drives??
If this is true...we will have no choice but to leave Dropbox and migrate to something else.
Unfortunately, it sounds like the change is being driven by Apple itself, not by Dropbox, which may mean that all alternative services face a similar limitation. If you continue to use Macs running Ventura or later, you may need to find another way to work or acquire machines with more internal storage (which a cynic might suspect as a reason for Apple to make the change).
So for older systems on older OS's this will or will not happen? ie my main rig is on Catalina and I wasn't planning on upgrading it anytime soon. Will I need to find another solution for our 20TB dropbox?? holy moly this is a disaster.
This is bad bad news, and may make Dropbox unusable for me, as well.
Anyone have any thoughts about sticking an alias in that new required location, that points to an external drive?
Doesn't work. Only the alias file itself gets synced.
Same thing for a symlink.
Would love to know the answer to this -- if anybody knows and can chime in it would be much appreciated. If one runs a version of OS pre Ventura, will this prevent the external hard drive sync being dropped?
I just switched to Pionner's Rekordbox professional plan that includes Dropbox unlimited.
I have a large music library, 3.5 tb, that is stored on an external ssd. This change is a no no as there is no way to store that in my internal ssd.
I will have to initiate a refund as this option no longer serves my needs.
Bye bye Dropbox,
- One drive appear to have made a workaround. Major shame db haven’t. 😕
Could you kindly provide a link with information on how to make One Drive work as an alternative? Would love to find an alternative service but unable to find anything as of yet
Dropbox, you need to do better than this. It's a failure on your part not to have communicated this better. It will cost your customers time, money, and energy to salvage their workflows. Rolling out an update like this should have been at least a 90 day progression, NOT a next time you restart all your frickin' files will either be offline or crash your 1TB OS HD. COME ON DB! Make this right and get a workaround.
David, Of course Dropbox could support external drives as they did before today OR other cloud storage solutions continue to do (sync.com, icedrive, pCloud). Lets be clear that this is a design choice by Dropbox.
"Lets be clear that this is a design choice by Dropbox."
I'm not so sure. This previous thread about this (which someone sent me earlier today) implies Apple is slowly forcing all the streaming companies to do this - OneDrive already made the change a year back, and now has a workaround.
Looks like an Apple thing not a Dropbox thing. (Note the mention of Ventura is a red-herring, this affects Monterey too).
From a Reddit user: "It is linked to your home user folder location. If you move your home folder to an external drive, dropbox goes with it. And for that matter, so do google drive, one drive, box etc."
This may be a solution - will require testing.Further exchange with Dropbox support:
Hello, welcome to Dropbox support. How can we help you?>Hi there, I wanted to confirm something>Hello there Jon, and thank you for contacting Dropbox support. My name is Jackson, and I will be more than happy to assist you with your issue, right away.>Hi Jackson.I understand Dropbox going forward will no longer support storing the folder outside of the user directory. This means by default we can't store it on an external drive.(OSX)>A bunch of us are discussing this here https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Storage-Space/Disaster-Dropbox-removing-external-disk-support-for-Mac-users/m-p/659876#M10309>That is true yes it will be under Library/Cloudstorage>Someone on Reddit has suggested a workaround could be to move your Mac user directory (your home folder) onto an external drive. This would mean that ~/Library/Cloudstorage would be on the external drive.Can you confirm if this would work?>From my understanding, you would like to know if moving the whole user folder, would allow the Dropbox folder to be placed on the external drive.>Correct.>I am afraid I do not have definitive information about this workaround. The Dropbox folder, and the folders of other cloud services will have to be under that folder. If the folder is on the external drive, reasonably the Dropbox folder would also be located there>OK so we'll just have to experiment. I have to say given this will mostly affect business users, the fact there's been little notification or suggestion of workarounds (only a note I happened to come across saying that our data would be moved without warning) isn't very professional.(if you wanted to pass that back)We shouldn't be having to experiment with hacks, when we use this as a serious tool.>Ok! I will forward your suggestion to the team. The restriction is set by the macOS>Thank you.>And for us to give an official workaround, we have to be 100% sure that it will not cause issuesFor instanceHaving your Dropbox folder on the external drive is already riskySince if it failsThere is a chance of file loss>Perhaps the team could look into the workaround I'm suggesting and check it for ruggedness, and inform the community (e.g. on the link above)? There's a bunch of us paying thousands of pounds/dollars a year looking to jump ship to OneDrive (who have a workaround) or similar, and we REALLY don't want to.>I will make sure to forward it to them. I know that Onedrive is using a workaround where they symlink the folder to that locationInstead of moving it there>We use extended version history to mitigate for disconnected external drives btw. It's not practical to store the amount of data we handle on an internal SSD.And I know lots of other users are the sameWe're doing 4-8k video production>Understood. I will forward your suggestion to them, since the team looks for user suggestions when implementing changesHas anyone lost functionality yet? If so, have you attempted to move your Home User folder over to your external? I found a great article on how to move your Home User folder but haven't tried it yet: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2017/01/25/how-to-move-mac-user-folder-to-another-drive/
Since my business and clients are all on Dropbox, cancelling the service isn't possible. Buying a new Mac with at least 1 TB of storage seems a bit pricey to fix this issue.
I have been preaching the gospel of Dropbox for decades and now they do this to the faithful. Shame on them.
You can install the entire Mac OS on an external SSD drive. Why not do that and then run apps, like Dropbox, off of it too?
It's not a real option to only run off an external drive when you need Dropbox use. Sorry, that's just kinda crazy.
dropbox you really need to answer with your future plans for this. I'm about to come due for renewal later this month and would love to either move on or keep dropbox forever because you HAVE COMMITTED TO HAVING AN OPTION WHICH ALWAYS WORKS for external storage.
In the meantime it's working fine on the older non file-provider version, but I REALLY NEED TO KNOW if Dropbox is committed to a longer-term answer.
- Mark
Super User II
davidgaw wrote:
Unfortunately, it sounds like the change is being driven by Apple itself, not by Dropbox, which may mean that all alternative services face a similar limitation. If you continue to use Macs running Ventura or later, you may need to find another way to work or acquire machines with more internal storage (which a cynic might suspect as a reason for Apple to make the change).
It totally is - and its annoying that Dropbox isnt saying this as much as I expected. The API changes that are coming will impact all cloud providers at some point.
It's not like Dropbox and Apple don't know each other lol, actually they're headquartered in the same city and probably share a lot of former employees.
Dropbox it's YOUR JOB to keep up to date with Apple's API, not the other way around.
NNNO MAC - WINDOWS 10
This is what Apple has done since the 80's. Forced obsolesce. Typically new OS that cannot run on old hardware, thus forcing a hardware upgrade. But now, in the era of cloud computing, they too will find another way to get us to buy another Mac. My 1TB drive on my iMac Pro (which cost over $5K) is packed. I use an external SSD for my Scratch Disk, but was hoping to run DB off of it. Looks like I better come up with a new plan. BTW, my Mac is still plenty fast, yet I can't upgrade the internal harddrive.
