You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
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 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.
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.
