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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...
Megan
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi 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.
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?
I don’t know, do you have enough space on the system drive to hold these 80GBs and more? Because while I assume the client will keep having an option to designate files and folders as always available offline, the fact of the matter is that the cloud management API of macOS will have the last say and may offload some files to the cloud to make room for others if it deems it necessary, and if the experience with OneDrive which Microsoft adapted to this API already with Monterey is anything to go by, control over one’s files will become an uncertain thing at best. I just have a Windows machine to keep a local copy on both cloud services, because it’s clear Apple is so sold on the idea of files on-demand that they won’t let you have it on their systems.
I tried treeandrew's excellent idea of copying the user directory over to my partition drive (I keep my 2nd drive internal to the machine - and yes, SSD only! Hence major investment for a 4T drive to sync locally and in cloud). Thank you, such an intelligent solution.
However, Ventura prevented me from copying the Home folder - all kinds of files were not given permission. I used both Finder and Terminal. The syntax for Terminal was: cp -r <Home Directory> <Target Destination>
Finder error was simply:Terminal gives much more information about the copy failures, which are sometimes "Permission Denied" or "No Such File or Directory" or "unable to copy extended attributes" &c &c. But mainly "Permission Denied". The majority of these were in the "Library" directory.
Were I back in my PC days, at this point I would have ripped out the SSD, stuck it in a USB hub, and copied using another system. However, with macs that breaks warranty, and I haven't got time.
So I called Mac service support. I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with them, and got ***Amazing*** service, really they are great. Two techs walked through all of my trials, thought through multiple scenarios, we tried different ways to copy the Home folder, and to no avail. He's raising it to engineers to see if they can't allow the Cloud Services folder to exist on another drive.
The idea that everyone is migrating to cloud-based only data is WRONG. Not because of my personal feefees, but look at the market. HDs on portable computers are now huge. You can get an 8T SSD in the latest macs. If we're carrying around that much data, it's so insecure, it's obvs we need it backed up on the cloud. But not exclusively--otherwise, why 8T drive, and Dropbox indexing just can't cope (sorry but it's true - maybe for your emails or letters or whatever, but not for a research library). Dropbox is good for backup, and great for sharing, but it ain't up to indexing.Apple will be getting back to me - unfortunately, not before I set off on 2 wk lecture tour where I need data with me, but I'll workaround. I hope you at Dropbox are also pounding Apple with this problem! For your loyal customers who rely on you!
drop box will essentially work as it currently does for you, although your Mac is going to be a little 'fuller' than it needs to be. The main issue arrises for people who need local/downloaded/ready-to-use files that are collectively larger than their system drive. so many people use an external drive for DB location because they have 2TB or 8Tb of video files for example and need them available to use in projects, but local internal drive is very rarely that large and empty.
