Dropbox support for macOS 12.3

Seriously?  All of my files are on Dropbox, organized the way I want them on Mac Finder.  The new upgrade will move ALL MY FILES to a different location?  And some of them will not work?  This is a disaster in the making.  And what happens when I try to access them on a different computer? Will the fire structures be different?  How long can I avoid this upgrade?

So what happens if I don't update to MacOS File Provider?

I do not use iCloud at all, so there is no need for my files to ever be in ~/Library/CloudStorage

And more importantly it's literally my computer, it's not Dropbox's, and it's not Apple's, it's mine, and as the owner I am the only one who gets to decide  where the files go. It's completely ridiculous for Dropbox, Apple or any other tech company to think they should be able move the location of my files on their own without my permission.

I'm not interested in a boilerplate response that Apple is making you do it for blah, blah, blah reasons. I'm just going to keep clicking 'not now' every time the nag message comes up. Will my files continue to sync as expected indefinitely or is there some hard deadline where that will stop working.

If there is a deadline where it will stop working if I haven't switched to MacOS File Provider, I will switch to a competing service. 

Hi there, 

I'm on Mac Ventura 13.4.1.

I can only ever access the Dropbox Beta app through the icon in my menu bar. The dropbox app just opens my finder folder. The app from the menu bar said I needed to update, so I did. After it updated, it started to move ALL of the contents of my dropbox folder to a new location. It said it would take an hour and sync in the background. I'm hours in and it says it has 51,000 files to go. I'm exceptionally nervous about what's happening here. I updated the app because I was trying to set up an external hard drive, but was running into issues with the hard drive not showing up in Beta. Now my files are being moved and it's gonna take far longer than an hour!

I can still see and access all my files when I log into the Dropbox.com, but all of my files that I try to access through dropbox in the sidebar of my finder window have an empty cloud icon and say they're uploading. I can access them, but I'm not sure what's going on. None of them are stored locally, they're all on Dropbox. 

Can anyone shed some light on what is happening? Apologies if this is nothing to sweat; data storage & migration is not my forte! 

I have been a Dropbox customer now for more than ten years and in that time I have tried all other major cloud services. Nothing even came close to Dropbox in terms of speed and reliability.

However, since this latest upgrade on macOS that moved the Dropbox folder to some Apple-dictated Cloud Storage folder, my experience has been exclusively abysmal. The major two issues that make Dropbox unusable for me right now are: (a) Folders that I selected to be available offline suddenly become online-only. And (b) Files just won't sync. Just now I am waiting to again download files that I have already selected to be available offline, but Dropbox just does nothing. It sits there "syncing", but does nothing. To make it work, I sometimes now go to the Dropbox webpage to directly download a file from there, because the syncing just takes far longer than manually downloading it from the website.

This has been my experience ever since this silly move of the Dropbox folder to some other directory. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Can I force the Dropbox folder to be in the old location? Or is it finally time to move on and go to Google or even Microsoft?

I do not use iCloud at all and am not signed in on my Mac, so whatever requirements are needed for Apple's ridiculous new file system don't apply to me.

More importantly, it's literally my computer I paid for it, and I'm the only one who gets to decide how my folders and files are structured. How Apple believes it's entitled to override my preference on a device I paid for is completely ridiculous. How Dropbox lets Apple decide how their software should operate is even more ridiculous.

Auto-updates are disabled on my computer, so that's not going to happen. There is a regex rule on my PiHole to block any DNS lookup with any variation the word "update" in in it. I've blocked all of Apple's bypass DNS lookups using mask-api and akadns , over 350 DOH and DNS over HTTPS domains, and I've blocked a the IP of a dozen DNS servers, and I've blocked ports 53 and 853. So there is an extremely robust set of firewall rules to deal with any device trying to evade PiHole blocking. So it's extremely unlikely Dropbox will find a way out and update on it's own.

Since there is now a deadline on the nag screen what is going to happen after that?

If Dropbox is going to stop working, then I'm going to end up canceling my subscription and switching to another service. If that's what's going to happen I'd like to start my search sooner rather than later.