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Jon C.10's avatar
Jon C.10
Collaborator | Level 8
3 years ago
Solved

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-...
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  • BenDBX's avatar
    BenDBX
    8 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!
studioj23's avatar
studioj23
Helpful | Level 5
3 years ago

It appears One Drive has developed a work around for this huge problem. See the heading "Using Another Volume" at this link:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/inside-the-new-files-on-demand-experience-on-macos/ba-p/3058922

 

Essentially the system drive still has the file aliases in the library folder but you can choose, on initial install, for these items to be synced locally at another location. This doesn't look like a hack, but rather something officially implemented by OneDrive. Unclear what the downsides are... 

 

Insane to me that there has been no outreach from Dropbox about this upcoming change. The service has been such a key component to our workflow for so long. will be unfortunate to have to find an alternative. 

 

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

studioj23- that post is dated Jan 2022!  So not only did OneDrive fix this over a year ago, this means that DropBox sat around for a year NOT coming up with a similiar workaround?!

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