Forum Discussion

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-...

desktop

dropbox business

Storage space

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!

mcarlson

Helpful | Level 5

3 years ago

This is also extremely worrisome to our future as well. We've spent years revolving around this feature and it is absolutely business critical. Without this feature of moving the sync folder anywhere, our entire sector of business will come to a complete stop. We use this feature so much because of the advantages it brings to processing, rendering and handling files locally that we can not do efficiently in the cloud. As of right now, we're being advised to not update the OS and thus the app will not get updated and remove the feature. However when we bring a new computer onboard, we will be forced to use the new OS that the machine ships with and will not be able to run a legacy OS and will be forced into the app version without the folder relocation. This is very worrisome. Without this particular feature, if we're forced to change our workflow, we're probably going to have to change our platform altogether. It would be a tough sell to attempt to use and pay for two different systems. We really don't want to leave Dropbox! You've been so great to us for so long!

Help us Dropbox Team, You're our only hope!

KzDbx
Community Manager
3 years ago
Hello everyone. Thank you for your feedback.

We understand that this is a significant pain point for you and your teams that rely on having Dropbox sync on external drives.
Currently, the File Provider API only supports your Dropbox folder in ~/Library/CloudStorage. We are actively working on a solution to support external drives on the updated Dropbox for macOS. While we work to implement a solution, customers who have their Dropbox folder on an external drive will not be migrated to the updated macOS experience. External drive support will continue to work as usual on your current experience.

We will keep you updated when we have more details to share.
- millifoo
  Helpful | Level 7
  3 years ago
  KzDbx
  
  "While we work to implement a solution, customers who have their Dropbox folder on an external drive will not be migrated to the updated macOS experience. External drive support will continue to work as usual on your current experience."
  
  Hallelujah! Thank you, Dropbox, for listening.
  
  May I suggest that in the future, for those of us who contacted Customer Support directly, you give us mere mortals confirmation that our feedback is being taken seriously and being passed upwards?
  
  I made an attempt at that and was told outright by the service person that they would not escalate the issue. After asking to escalate the issue 6 times, I was told:
  
  "Charlotte: Unfortunately, I cannot escalate your case, I'm really sorry that I can't help more with this"
  
  As a Business Advanced customer, that's completely unacceptable.
  
  You were ->this<- close to losing us as a customer; in fact we were testing out OneDrive today to see if it'd fit our needs.
  - Peter Proulx
    Helpful | Level 5
    3 years ago
    Not realizing this was a limitation I upgraded one of my laptops to the new version. Anything saved on the laptop running the new version is not syncing with my main system with external storage. How can I revert my laptop to the old version of DropBox?
    
    Thanks,
    Pete
- FonsecaSergio
  Helpful | Level 5
  3 years ago
  Thank you 👍🏻
- tillkrueger
  Collaborator | Level 10
  3 years ago
  THANK GOODNESS!!!
  
  This issue had me spinning out for days, now, hardly allowing me to think of anything else, because it would have impacted my workflow gravely, or rather, made it impossible to work with my clients and sub-contractor as I had been for over a decade.
  
  Finally, there is hope that this will all be taken care of in due time, and my files are safe on my external NVMe's, in the meantime. I had just invested over $2000 in external RAID and NVMe storage solutions to replace the spinning drives that previously held my 2,2TB Dropbox file library, and was overjoyed to finally use them as if they were stored on internal storage...and then the bad news, which made my heart sink.
  
  Thank you for giving this the urgent care it deserves and working on avoiding a mass exodus from Dropbox to...well...where would we go?