We are aware of the issue with the badge emails resending to everyone, we apologise for the inconvenience - learn more here.

Forum Discussion

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...
Desktop
dropbox business
Storage space
  • 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!
KzDbx's avatar
KzDbx
Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager

Hello everyone. Thank you for your feedback.


We understand that this is a significant pain point for you and your teams that rely on having Dropbox sync on external drives.
Currently, the File Provider API only supports your Dropbox folder in ~/Library/CloudStorage. We are actively working on a solution to support external drives on the updated Dropbox for macOS. While we work to implement a solution, customers who have their Dropbox folder on an external drive will not be migrated to the updated macOS experience. External drive support will continue to work as usual on your current experience.


We will keep you updated when we have more details to share.

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

KzDbx 

 

"While we work to implement a solution, customers who have their Dropbox folder on an external drive will not be migrated to the updated macOS experience. External drive support will continue to work as usual on your current experience."

 

Hallelujah! Thank you, Dropbox, for listening. 

 

May I suggest that in the future, for those of us who contacted Customer Support directly, you give us mere mortals confirmation that our feedback is being taken seriously and being passed upwards?

 

I made an attempt at that and was told outright by the service person that they would not escalate the issue.  After asking to escalate the issue 6 times, I was told:

 

"Charlotte: Unfortunately, I cannot escalate your case, I'm really sorry that I can't help more with this"

 

As a Business Advanced customer, that's completely unacceptable.

 

You were ->this<- close to losing us as a customer; in fact we were testing out OneDrive today to see if it'd fit our needs.

  • Peter Proulx's avatar
    Peter Proulx
    Helpful | Level 5
    2 years ago

    Not realizing this was a limitation I upgraded one of my laptops to the new version. Anything saved on the laptop running the new version is not syncing with my main system with external storage. How can I revert my laptop to the old version of DropBox?

     

    Thanks,

    Pete

    • millifoo's avatar
      millifoo
      Helpful | Level 7
      2 years ago

      Peter Proulx 

       

      I don't think you can go back to the old version. It auto-updates, and so far as I know DropBox doesn't let you revert to older versions.

       

      As a temporary workaround (and it may be permanent if it works well) I'm now using Mountain Duck for syncing to my external drive:

       

      https://mountainduck.io

       

       

      • Bluebiycle's avatar
        Bluebiycle
        Helpful | Level 6
        2 years ago

        Very interesting will look at this. The crucial thing for us, is that we all have the same mount points, to avoid relinking media to our editing applications as we collaborate with each other

    • Jamesgangcc's avatar
      Jamesgangcc
      Collaborator | Level 9
      2 years ago

      Peter Proulx OMG.... good luck with that! Years ago I accidentally allowed Dropbox to "just simply" backup my mac. I'm still dealing with that issue. Moving the folders over to externals from dropbox has been interesting. I'm finding triplicates in some situations (some are my fault, you know, the "have I saved this?" conundrum) and others from having to go back and forth twice with Dropbox. My computer today slowed to a crawl while Dropbox was "synched" or connected or whatever. Finally... 

About Storage Space

Looking for help with managing the storage space in your Dropbox account? Talk to the Dropbox Community and get advice from members.

Need more support

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X or Facebook.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!