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Forum Discussion
How can I download my Dropbox contents onto an external drive?
I'm really really disappointed with Dropbox over the last several years. I had an enormous issue as did others with preview of images and photos on my laptop which after a multi-year discussion on this forum with dropbox led me to give up and put them on OneDrive (which is much better at preview of thumbnails) so I could continue my family history writing. But I continued to use Dropbox as my backup solution and as needed for sharing.
I'm again totally disappointed with the effort to backup my dropbox cloud to an external harddrive. I've read all the posts here and on Reddit about the best way to do this. You have to synch the files to your harddrive on the laptop and then copy them to the harddrive (making it a multi-step process). I think I would live with that if Dropbox worked consistently with making files offline. But I can select a folder and say make the files offline (ie on my laptop). Then when I try to copy those to the harddrive I often get errors. Only some of the files in the folders show up offline. Sometimes I have to repeat the procedure multiple times on a single folder to get the files offline.
It is ridiculous that I can't select a dropbox folder and copy it to a hardrive and have dropbox dowload the files either directly to the external hardrive or to my laptop. I consider myself a fairly expert user of Dropbox (10+ years) and used to love it. Now I just tolerate it.
PS I tried cloudmount but ran into some issues with that solution too.
- Rich
Super User II
It is ridiculous that I can't select a dropbox folder and copy it to a hardrive and have dropbox dowload the files either directly to the external hardrive or to my laptop.
Just use a utility like Cyberduck or Mountain Duck to access your Dropbox account and copy files directly to your external drive. Cyberduck lets you directly access the files in the cloud. Mountain Duck allows you to map your account as a drive in Explorer/Finder.
Thanks I'll give that a try and will report back. Wish it was integrated into Dropbox itself..
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi hsaccount, thanks for posting today.
We appreciate the feedback on this matter.
Currently, there isn't a method to directly download the Dropbox account to an external drive without copying an existing Dropbox folder there, or manually moving it through the Dropbox desktop application.
We take all comments into consideration when improving the Dropbox site and services.
Yes I realize you have no solution for direct download to external drive. But in addition when I tell Dropbox to download a folder, it doesn't consistently download every file in the folder. So I have to look in each folder to see if it is ready to be copied from windows explorer to the external drive. This eats tons of time to get a clean download!
not acceptable. you have to find an immediate solution for this. Right-click the file I want to make available and Click Make available offline are not working on Mac
- Jay
What error are you getting when attempting mark files as available offline in your Dropbox folder?
