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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://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes
Just confirmed this with DB support (see below). Gutted - been with Dropbox for years and our entire video team flow is based around it 😕
>Hi there, I read today that you are scrapping the ability to store the Dropbox folder on external disks, on OSX. I'd like to ask more about this please.
> Hello Jon, and thank you for contacting Dropbox Support. My name is Joseph, and I will be more than happy to look into your request, right away.
That is correct Jon, as part of the Dropbox for macOS update, the Dropbox folder must be located in ~/Library/CloudStorage.
>This is a showstopper for us, and will mean we have to move to another service. We have a large distributed team using DB for video work, no way it'll fit within internal drives.
Is there a workaround?
> I totally understand and I apologize for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, there is no workaround on this as changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by macOS.
>This change doesn't seem to have hit us yet - we're running a variety of machines inc Ventura
What will trigger its enforcement? Can we stay on an earlier OS or Dropbox version?
>The updates happening automatically every time the Dropbox app is restarting, for example if your device never restarts it should maintain the older version but we can't guarantee full functionality on older versions of the application.
>So what will happen - if we have a Dropbox folder on an 8TB drive and a tiny internal drive - will it try to clone stuff across and eat up the space? What's the mechanism?
>That's right, it will try to move the content on your internal drive until it has no space and gives you an error.
>Is Smartsync still supported? I.e. will it move stuff to being online only if it won't fit?
>It is, however it is now known as online-only.
Just starting up a new thread because Dropbox marked the old one as SOLVED.
Continue making noise, this issue is NOT SOLVED.
LOL started a new thread and it was moved here. NOT SOLVED
- Rich
Super User II
Jon C.10 wrote:
>That's right, it will try to move the content on your internal drive until it has no space and gives you an error.
I'd call this into question. One of the things that happens when your Dropbox folder is moved during this update is that all files are marked as Online-only, meaning they don't take up any space on the local drive. It shouldn't fill the drive.
This would be a deal breaker for my business use of Dropbox. I'd have to cancel my pro subscription, worth thousands of dollars a year, and move to another service.
This is a bombshell for the entire Mac community. As everyone knows, Apple charges a fortune for extra terabytes of SSD storage on its Mac Studio, Mac Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro computers, and it's impossible to increase internal disk capacity after you purchase your computer. Up until now, however, it's been possible to augment a skimpy internal drive with very fast and cheap external SSDs.
In fact, I have been pricing out a new Mac Mini M2 with 512 Gigs on an internal drive, supported by 4T of external storage, on a wicked fast Samsung SSD inside a very inexpensive external, enclosure. This is a bargain, given that Dropbox and other apps can be placed on the external drive.
Now, however, it seems that either Apple or Dropbox — or both companies working in tandem to skr3w us consumers--are making this impossible. Soon we'lll all be victims of Apple's greed and monopolistic power to squeeze us for every dollar they can extract.
My only response can be to stop using Dropbox and find an alternative. Microsoft OneDrive has already deprecated use of external drive. And, given that it irreparably corrupts PDF files, I can no longer recommend it to anyone.
I now must throw myself on the mercy of the Dropbox community. Is it really true that MacOS will soon make it impossible to use a cloud service on an external drive. If so, what can we do t work around this? If not, which of the many alternate cloud services are the most reliable and serviceable? HELP?
- ArthurPix
It is true and there still does not seem to be a workaround. Dropbox seems to be leaving us in the dark.
The most viable alternative that I’ve found seems to be Sync.com, which still works on an external drive, but isn’t as robust as DropBox and has a 40Mbps upload speed limit - which, if you have a gigabit connection and need to upload large amounts of data, is pretty slow.ArthurPix yes, it is a bit slow. But it's also fantastic. And they have just a few days ago sped it up. It's still not real fast but it's better. At least a listen, that's more than I can say for drop your box.
We pay $30 between two of us for a business pro account and have UNLIMITED STORAGE. That more than fits our needs and the speed is good enough.
They also are private. Again, drop your box is ridiculous. They openly state they will give your content to anyone and they will even read it or listen to it or whatever they want to do. I could not be more happy than to be away from them.
Just to be clear, I have dropped all of our paying accounts with dropbox. I am now on a free account. Two other people at our business no longer pay dropbox anything and have moved to sync.com. And there are numerous other friends of mine that are now no longer involved.
I really dislike politics altogether. But one thing I'm not is "woke". And here is a major corporation like Drop your box throwing in our faces, racist nonsense. It is more than I can take. I instructed them to immediately give me a response as to what they are doing to prevent this in the company further and give everybody a fair chance. They just blew me off. I wrote numerous times demanding a response. So I voted with my wallet.
My hope is that they go in the way of the dodo bird. Just like the Twitter employees.
In the meantime, sync.com is more than sufficient for 95% of us. There are definitely some use cases that will require more speed. However, they will now have an enormous problem with dropbox due to the space issues of having to have this on their primary drives. This is a complete non-starter for a great many businesses.
No, not really. It's just that dropbox doesn't want to do what it takes to make it work.
Sync.com is a fantastic alternative. They are a little bit slower, but they just sped up their service as well. So it's still a bit slower but much better. I don't know what the actual numbers are but I would absolutely try it.
Here's what I really like about them… They are private. They cannot see what you are uploading under any condition. And that's unlike dropbox that says openly they will share your stuff with anybody they want to. Drop boxes terms of service are horrific it should be illegal.
In addition, dropbox is a filthy woke corporation. They believe it's OK to discriminate. Just in reverse. They have a white manager who has openly said she would rather overlook even qualified candidates to hire black people. I have never been quite so disgusted in my entire life and told them so. They could care less. I demanded somebody get back to me about how they have corrected the situation and what actions were taken. I could hear crickets.
Being a person of a mixed family, all of us are disgusted by that. We all want a fair chance. That's all we want. Not a "more fair" chance than the next person. Nobody has to give any of us a break because of our color. That is disgusting on its face.
Sync.com has another thing that I just love. There are two of us and so we bought their business pro account. But are you sitting down? I think we pay $30 a month for the both of us in total. And for that, we have 100% unlimited space. Yes you read that right. So it is a bit slower, but not too bad, completely, 100% private, and now faster. So many improvements have just been made it's just amazing. Sync.com cares, and they listen. Two things the dropbox does not.
I was paying dropbox several hundred dollars a year and that was just for my account. I have now canceled my account and have gone to the free level as have several other people that I'm friends with and two other people in our company. I wonder how much this is really costing them? Yes we're just a few and very little. But it is not just us that is finding better places.
Dropbox marches on to the tune of their own "woke drummer". They have never given an appropriate answer. They have never even attempted to do what it takes to solve this. And we know that if other companies can solve it, they can do. Yes, yes Apple is suggesting that the main drive used. That's convenient for Apple as it causes all of us to buy a bigger drives. However, that is not the answer. Many of us have way too big of stuff that needs to be stored and accessed and the main drive even at 8 TB would not be big enough.
I'm very happy with sync.com. No, they are not paying me to say anything. I'm hoping this is somewhat like salt in the wound. Dropbox screwed me for a long time, refused to respond to my concerns, trade like crazy to keep me from downgrading my account. They can sign you up all right with a click of a button but to get away from them they can't help you. You have to trudge through their menus figure out how to get out and then click the buttons yourself. Ridiculous. They claim it's for privacy reasons. Funny that they don't respect her privacy in any other way.
Really, I just want to make sure this thread keeps going. Let's make sure everyone knows how ridiculous the situation really is. Maybe some Wolk engineer in dropbox will actually read it. I'm sure they won't care, but I wish for them the same future that Twitter employees had.
Next time when I instruct you to respond, I expect you to do so. I was a paying customer and I still would be. You failed me. You failed the common decency test as well. But you failed to follow my instructions and at least give me an update. You failed all of us in your ridiculous privacy policy. And now you show us how little you care by not even giving a real response to our questions and marking it as solved. I really do hope that each and every employee of this silly company get treated the exact same way they are treating others.
- Dude stop with the “woke”‘political crap. OMG you are just too much. The whole idea of “woke” is so completely out of context and frankly ignorant. Stop making every **bleep** thing political.
Nobody gives a flying crap about your politics. NOBODY CARES.
I've contacted support and they have actually been very helpful.
Today I got a followup on the mail, which might solve the issue with the external drives.
The app Dropbox is now updating my all my files (which may take a day or two), so I'll have to wait until it's finished to be sure it works.
I'll post an update once it's ready.For now, I can share my setup and possible solution provided by the Dropbox support.
My setup might differ a bit form others so keep this in mind, but I do think it could work for many of you.
Also, please take caution. I don't now if everything will be synced as before untill the update process has finished.
---
My setup:iMac, 512GB harddisk space
Holding base Dropbox folder (with about 50GB of data synced)
Now relocated to the cloudStorage folder due to Apple's policy with a symlink to this at the old location (automatically created by the Dropbox update).
2x External drive 1TB
Synced via the Dropbox Backup
I'm not sure this these were located at the Dropbox Backup tab before, but they are now.
Both drives have an .dbx-external-drive extension in the Dropbox cloud.
This setup has worked for over a year and stopped working after the MacOs + Dropbox update
The drives were stated as disconnected on the Dropbox Backup tab and could not be reconnected.
If you have the base Dropbox folder located on an external drive, this will propably not work, but as a workaround you could create a new empty one at your working station (might allready be done by the update) and add the external drives via the Dropbox bakcup option.
-----------------------------------------------
The solution (?), provided by Dropbox:--------------------------------------------
For me, it was the last step of the solution which made the drives visible again by DropBox; checking the removable drives box in the Security and Privacy tab. Just in case, I'll copy the complete reaction with all steps provided by Dropbox:
---
Could you please check that all options listed in the Sharing and Permissions section of each external drive's Get Info page (navigate to external drive and press command + i) are set to ''Read & Write'' please?
I have attached below help articles from Apple explaining further the process:
https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mchlp1038/mac
https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mchlp1203/12.0/mac/12.0
Additionally, can you please ensure that "Removable Volumes" are enabled for Dropbox by the following steps:
- Open System Preferences.
- Click Security and Privacy.
- Click the Privacy tab.
- Click Files and Folders.
- Check the box next to Removable Volumes under Dropbox.
Once the above has been applied to each drive, can you please reconnect the drive were you should hopefully be prompted to backup again as desired.
Should the issue persist after completing the above steps, I kindly request that you advise us of what you encountered when attempting the above (with screenshots if possible) to enable us to investigate further.This is a disaster! We are a creative firm using external drives for big file storage on our Macs. Why Apple!? Why!? Please give us back the ability to store data where we want to!!
I only partly blame Apple. This lies squarely in the lap of drop your box. They have mismanaged their company, mismanaged their service, mismanaged their communication with their customers and dropped the ball and the box entirely. They should be ashamed of themselves.
They could've created their own an API. Apparently other companies are doing exactly that. They are figuring a way to make this work we're only drop your box is screwed the pooch every which way but loose.
Due to the way they treated me previously when I confronted them on their silly decisions to let a woman act racist in a public way who is the manager for them, I am happy to keep the pressure on them. Next time when I ask for an answer, maybe you'll give one. Or maybe you won't be here to be able to give one. Either way works for me.
Drop your box could've handled this had they got their asses in gear long ago. They are big enough to actually exert pressure on Apple. I don't know what they have or haven't done but whatever it is it hasn't worked. And they have failed to communicate with their customers in a timely manner as well.
Drop your box disgusts me. This is a perfect study on a slow moving disaster. I think though it will speed up here quite shortly.
I'm happy to keep applying pressure to get this fixed. Dropbox is a big part of our creative business and we pay a lot of $ every month for it. Not it is pretty much rendered useless.
As someone with a ton of Dropbox data on an external, this is a pretty frustrating situation. However, I do want to just point out that Dropbox's initial response, which flagged this thread as "solved," does say pretty clearly that they are working on a solution that would allow us to continue working on external drives despite the OS changes, that users with files currently on externals will not be migrated over to the new system yet, and that they will let us know when they have more to share. That is probably the clearest and most detailed response we could realistically hope for, given that the Dropbox team is ALSO being kept in the dark.
The fact is, much of the anger over this issue should really be directed at Apple, not Dropbox. If you poke around a bit in other adjacent communities (Synology, etc), you will see similar outrage directed at various companies for failing to provide a timely solution to this issue, and for failing to communicate clearly about it. But in reading the responses from company representatives to these threads, it's clear that what's really happening here is Apple is not keeping companies like Dropbox, Synology etc in the loop. They are just ghosting these teams and leaving them trying to guess when, if or how to implement a feature that has been slow-walked, redesigned and rescheduled numerous times from the get-go. And even further reading reveals that many experienced IT folk believe there isn't a compelling case for Apple to require that this CloudStorage folder live on the internal storage at all. It is very likely a means to force customers into spending more up-front on their machine purchases, for built-in storage that is soldered to the motherboard and cannot be upgraded. This IS the Apple way, and it has been almost since inception. They hate handing revenue to third party companies, and are not at all shy about using proprietary elements or other means to enforce ecosystem lock-ins that keep the money in-house. I say this as a long-time user/fan that is deeply invested in their products, and as a shareholder. I love their products, I have no ill will toward them, this is just an observation of fact, not a tirade against them.
I'm not saying Dropbox is completely innocent here. Only that it's obvious that Apple is not being forthcoming or working very well with third-party companies impacted by kernel extension deprecation/File Provider situation. So we should probably try to be a little understanding of Dropbox's rock-and-a-hard-place situation here.
beenyweenies This is all true to an extent, BUT…
As Simeone who’s been aware of this cruel policy for quite some time, I’d just like to point out that it was ONLY after we users kicked up a storm and some of us started canceling our auto-renewals and migrating to providers such as Sync and PCloud that Dropbox made the declaration we have been speaking of, and two months later there is still no solution. Some of us have our livelihoods tied to these policies, so it’s what you might call an existential dilemma.
All this said, I do get your suggestion that we should be directing our anger at Apple, and to an extent I agree, but Dropbox seems to care a bit more about users than does Apple. I have personally been complaining to Apple, as have others.
ArthurPix I hear you. And I agree that Dropbox didn't handle this as well as they could have. I just wanted to point out that many other communities are going through this same thing, and Apple's lack of communication/responsiveness is making it difficult for these companies to plot a coherent course of action.
We should definitely hold Dropbox accountable, but we should also be voicing our opinions to Apple as it sounds like you have (bravo!). If the chorus of displeasure grows loud enough, maybe Apple will back off on this silly requirement that the CloudStorage folder must live on the local drive. A boy can dream, anyway.
Apple File Provider is a MAJOR DESASTER - i quit my Dropbox Account
Title says it all
Dropbox Folder needs to sit on the system drive
Such an ignorance, i'm totally floored.
>> "We're always looking for ways to improve Dropbox. We regularly release new versions of our products with better performance, additional features, and security enhancements." <<
My suggestion:Start by not deteriorating your products. Apple File Provider is an unbeatable disaster.We have massive computing power at our disposal, and all we users do with it is process Word and Excel online. Is this your vision of our work?
Are your imaginations so limited that you can't fathom how a user deals with 2TB of synced data? Do you have any idea how an audio program accesses data? A photo program? A video program?
Do you really think we can or even want to handle online-only data? I just canceled my 2TB Dropbox account because you've made it unusable. You've crippled your own product and failed to deliver on your performance promise.
According to the new Apple File Provider guidelines, I would have to equip my 4 Macs with 3TB system HDs to accommodate the Dropbox Folder, the system, and swap RAM. This fails because system HDs cannot be replaced afterward and because Mac Mini and MacBook Air are not even offered with 3TB HDs.
I am shocked by this ignorance.
I was just about to upgrade but because I had this same thing happen to me with OneDrive, I thought to check first. This info should be very visible when you go to sign up. Something like, "On a Mac? Read this first!" Profits and all that though...what can you do?
I use Sync cloud because I can sync to an external drive still. Not sure what they're doing different but there you go.
Edit: I may have to retract. What is this I just found? I was able to choose an external drive.
Hi, where is this option please, and could you confirm if this worked?
I am needing to move 280GB from my Mac, onto an external drive.
Thanks
For me it's this: Preferences>sync tab>dropbox folder location>click the dropdown and select 'other'>then find the drive you want.
I'm on dropbox app v181.3.5613 on Ventura.
It would be good if the OP could remove the "Resolved" marking for this thread.
Thanks!
The Dark Knight Ah finally found the button - done!
Awesome - thanks Jon C.10!
You're a legend for starting this thread!
