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...
Interesting!
In spite of this thread, I renewed for another year back in November under the premise that Dropbox said they would not FORCE the update and you had to opt in. I'm on Ventura on a Mac Studio that restarts fresh every day, and am still fine with my 2TB living on an external drive. My 2015 iMac (back on Mojave) is also still doing fine with Dropbox on an external.
It's not in spite of this thread.. it's because of this thread, at least in part. At the beginning of this thread, Dropbox said there were NO other alternatives and dropbox would ONLY be supported on the system drive. Because of this thread (at least in part), Dropbox backpedaled a little and now says you can still use the previous version of Dropbox and store on external drives. So... thank those of us who have whined about this from the start. :).
Just weighing in on the recent comments on this thread. No one here should be arguing over whether a person should purchase enough internal storage to satisfy the new cloud storage mechanism. That is a personal choice, based on budget and need, and is not always realistic. I personally have 7TB of data and much more on the way. Macbook Pros max out at 8TB, and at an additional cost of $2,200. If that is a good plan for YOU, then so be it. But it won't be for most.
I'm going to reiterate my long term solution which has been working flawlessly, in case it helps others here. I purchased a 5-drive Synology DS1522+ NAS and loaded it with enough WD Red drives to give me 20+TB of data. One of the software packages that is included, Synology Drive, has local/cloud sync features just like Dropbox, so I can locally sync whatever project I'm working on at the moment for fast speeds, then switch those files back to cloud only when the project is complete to free that space up again. It works just as well as Dropbox. However, I decided to upgrade my network components to 10Gbe so that I can work directly off the NAS, and this gave me around 700MB/s write, 900MB/s read speeds, which is plenty for my personal needs. This entire setup cost me around $1,500, far less than Apple charges for around 1/3 the local storage on a new Macbook Pro. I ALSO pay around $10/month to back up all of my files to iDrive E2 cloud storage, which the Synology NAS does automatically every night, eliminating most risk from using local storage.
beenyweenies this is a perfect solution for those of us with the tech chops to manage it. I also have a Synology NAS and have thought hard about doing something similar — but honestly have found it simpler to go with a provider such as Sync.com. I have Gigabit Internet and 2,5 Gbps throughput, however, which would make my NAS access faster —and your solution of daily backing up your entire Synology Drive to iDrive E2 is an ingenious set of suspenders that would solve my one reservation about taking the NAS route. I’d like to hear what others think of this. C’mon community, let’s talk! How many of you would feel comfortable going this route?
