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
MacOS 13.0 Ventura, and Dropbox follows OneDrive in forcing the folder on the system drive
With Monterey, OneDrive implemented the new apis from Apple for online syncing that demanded its main location be a specific folder on the system drive. 8 months later, the MacOS community section of their site is a collection of anger, accounts of giving up on the platform entirely, praise for Dropbox for not going the same way.
Except it just did, it only waited until Ventura, and now my 360GB Dropbox home folder is supposed to fit on a drive that has about 160GB available, and I guess it was Apple's fault all along, but this is still a major malus to my having any use for Dropbox, I want a full hard copy of my files on local and not having to download them on the fly. This is a bummer.
Hi,
Regarding: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-faqs that is being constantly popping up as some sort of nagscreen.
This URL doesn't really explain *why* this change is supposedly necessary? I've tried searching this board but it's rather hard to get a result for "why" (or that is to say: the word is used *a lot*).
As it stands, with the current version of Dropbox, my custom Dropbox folder is working absolutely perfectly fine. So it doesn't look like "Changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by macOS." but it's more like "Changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by Dropbox.". It's working fine as it stands, so would appear MacOS supports it just fine.
This also goes for "Storing your Dropbox folder on an external drive is no longer supported by macOS.". As it stands, it's working perfectly fine on MacOS Ventura with the current version of the Dropbox-app. So this also sounds like it isn't MacOS "not supporting it", it's Dropbox that's - for unexplained reasons (at least: not on the info page linked above) - dropping these critical features that are working absolutely brilliantly in the current version.
So I'm just curious: why is Dropbox removing all these very useful features, whom are evidently working just fine on Ventura? (And blaming MacOS as the culprit in the process?)
Hope the information page can make some clarifications, I don't understand at all now why these changes are being *forced* upon us whilst there doesn't seem to be any reason, at least none that are being explained on that information page, to drop these features.
Thank you so much for the information and/or updating the information page - and I hope Dropbox reconsiders these what appear to be unnecessary changes, because this means Dropbox will force me to start using another storage solution that does support external drives and custom folders. 😞- Walter
Dropbox Staff
Hey LvH, thanks for posting on our Community and providing your thoughts on this. Your feedback has been noted in our system.
It seems that you haven't opted in the beta for Mac OS users, so you haven't received this update yet on your device.
If you’re interested in joining our private beta, you can turn on early releases while you can also keep up to date with what is supported on macOS 12 and higher by viewing this article.
The updated Dropbox for macOS app has been developed to adhere to the requirement as set out by Apple therefore this update was introduced to ensure the best possible experience for our Mac users long into the future.
I hope this information helps and please let us know if you have anything else to add or ask.
So is the ability to move your dropbox folder to an external drive going to be added in a future version or is this function going to be completely removed. If so, I am going to cancel my subscription. My primary boot drive doesn't have enough space for my dropbox folder so I need it on an external drive. Please let me know if this is not going to be a supported function, so I can find an alternative to dropbox that does support external drives.
I do not get it either. The "old" dropbox version seems to work just fine on Ventura so Dropbox is just throwing away its features of seemingly no reason whatsoever. It was one of the big things that the dropbox folder could be everywhere. I have a Mac Mini at home mirroring my Dropbox on an external hard drive, for example. What am I supposed to do now? Run it on Windows?
Please Dropbox, don't remove perfectly fine and working features just because the others did so! Don't become the others! Stay as you are!
Well, I see now. This is a great resource! I've never been a fan of the way iCloud handled offline storage. You appear to be ceding a lot of power to Apple. Shame that this system will have to essentially replace all cloud storage solutions. Thanks for your assistance, brother.
- Megan
Hi Emanuele B., thanks for reaching out about this.
Thank you for your feedback.As with any operating system, macOS is updated regularly and with that we must keep the Dropbox desktop app aligned with any requirements set out by an OS.
Keeping aligned to those requirements ensures that the Dropbox desktop app will provide the best possible experience for all our customers in to the future.
We’ll be sure to pass your feedback along to our Product team.
Thank you.
This is an AWFUL idea. I work for a media company of nearly 100 people, all using Dropbox. We have a giant Dropbox of about 100TB (yes, TB...not a typo). Due to the large file sizes we use, we HAVE to use external drives and this change makes Dropbox unusable for us. I highly suspect we will be moving to a different service.
After all the money we've given Dropbox, this is a huge disappointment.
Dropbox was synching fine, and then I opted to relink it after moving it. Now Dropbox wants to store 100+GB in my Library folder? What the f? Anyone have a fix to this?
Hello, and thanks for replying.
Keeping aligned will ensure the continued existence of Dropbox on macOS, but as for the “best possible experience”, I mean yes, emphasis on “possible” as in “the one that is allowed to be”, and i realize Dropbox had limited pushback in this or we wouldn’t be in this situation, but I tell you, I will not spend thousands of euros to get a Mac with a larger internal drive just so i can run the cloud service that I’m already paying for fully local.
This is going to end in tears for a lot of people.
Any chance you can elaborate here? I'm on the latest version of Monterey. I only care about one subfolder (approx 80gbs) to be 100% offline. All the others can stay off my device unless specifically called upon. That's how dropbox is operating currently. Would this change if I upgraded to ventura?
This is an absolute travesty. I've just bought a new MacBook pro, and am only able to install a Ventura OS. I bought my whole system, and spent a year writing a grant to do it, just for the capability of dropbox archiving a fully indexed research archive.
I am an academic, and have 3.0 Terabytes of scholarship and academic articles and manuscripts indexed, physically on my harddrive on my old rig. This, naturally, needs to be kept on a partition drive, on my new rig, otherwise it's extremely unsafe. I have to be able to search my archive at my fingertips - cloud computing ain't going to cut it - you don't provide the speed or accuracy, and it's no good to me in the cloud when I'm an some archive somewhere trying to compare manuscripts.
Megan the "We must keep aligned" response is just placebo talk - it does nothing. This is a critical issue. My entire research archive and setup has been based around Mac's superior indexing for the last 9 years. My career is on the line if I don't get my book out on time, and this has become a major obstacle. I've been paying for my dropbox subscription for years for this very setup, competing for grants to fund it and battling with local institutions to prevent them forcing me to one drive. This is not a "happy alignment" issue, this is a major, critical system change, and will cause a major system shift and departure from Dropbox.
I've tried to delete the dropbox folder in it's hidden pathname Root:/Users/~username~/Library/CloudStorage, but now Dropbox has broken and can't read the folder.Hi Michael S.197 ,
And with regard to the problems you're specifically experiencing, can I make some suggestions - but perhaps you've done this already? Not sure.
- Create a NEW User on your machine - with Administrative privileges - if you haven't done so already
- Log in as that user
- Perform the copy of your old user's user profile directory as this new Administrative User - i.e. you're not copying while logged in as your primary user
- Alternatively, re-start your Mac in "safe mode" - I think that's what it's called - and log in as that second user - and do the same thing. The bottom line is you're trying to ensure that your primary user doesn't have any of the files in your User Profile Home directory locked or in use.
Does that make sense? Hope that might help.
Yep, it's huge pain, see my post here – https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Apps-and-Installations/DropBox-Unusable/td-p/635372
Hi All,
Just reporting whether the steps I took did address my original concern - the complete absence of the green "synchronised" indicators on my Dropbox folders under Ventura, and seeing whether relocating the Dropbox folder into the recommended Home Profile location would resolve that. Well the news is both good and bad ...
- Firstly, having moved the location of my Dropbox folder into the "recommended" location - inside my external SSD based Home Profile folder and re-syncing, the performance is great - despite the tedious requirement to resync completely.
- At first I thought that it hadn't fixed the sync indicators situation at all, but today, I started noticing that they were "re-appearing" - at the "leaf" nodes of the very substantial set of files I have - i.e. at the documents within the lowest level of the folder tree.
- Then as I progressed up those trees, with all files downloaded and local, the directories the indicators "percolated" up the tree.
- That is until you get to the very top-level of the folders directly under my Dropbox Folder ... they never seem to show a green indicator, even though every folder under them, is showing a green indicator.
So I'm not sure whether that is something that will resolve itself over time, as the sync indicators appearing sometime post the initial re-syncing did ... I'll wait and see. At least seeing the sync indicators at the lower levels is part way to what I was hoping to achieve.
- Walter
Hey treeandrew, could you send us a screenshot of the app's exact status as shown in your menu bar at the moment?
Is it 'up to date' or still syncing perhaps?
Emanuele B. Megan
I found a solution to this problem using the SUDO command for Mac Terminal.
https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstallThis worked for me. I have a 4 T drive, which is partitioned into a 1T system drive and 3T data drive. I have 1.9T of dropbox data.
Using this command sequence allows me to identify a folder on my data drive as my dropbox folder. Very helpful and elegant solution.
👍👍👍
