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Forum Discussion
No dialog box when connecting external HD?
I want to back up my external HD to my Dropbox account.
What should happen: When I connect the external drive, I should get a popup that asks if I want to back up the external drive, I select i...
Walter
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHey there Jennifer G.29 - thanks for posting on our Community and happy Monday!
If you've ensured that our desktop app is running on your computer and that the external drive's filesystem is a supported one, you should get that pop-up when you plug your external drive into your machine.
Just keep in mind that this feature only supports external drives with filesystem type NTFS for Windows and APFS or HFS+ for Macs.
Can you double check if your external drive is supported?
Let me know what you find and we'll take it from there, Jennifer.
If you've ensured that our desktop app is running on your computer and that the external drive's filesystem is a supported one, you should get that pop-up when you plug your external drive into your machine.
Just keep in mind that this feature only supports external drives with filesystem type NTFS for Windows and APFS or HFS+ for Macs.
Can you double check if your external drive is supported?
Let me know what you find and we'll take it from there, Jennifer.
Hi Walter, and thanks for your reply. The drive in my original question didn't have the right file system.
However, I reformatted another external drive as APFS encrypted and moved the files onto it. I still don't get a popup when I plug it in. Also, I don't see the Dropbox menu when I right-click on the folders or files; I do have that menu on all the files in the Dropbox folder. Other ideas? Thanks.
- JayHi Jennifer G.29, currently the external drive backup works for APFS and HFS+ for Mac devices.
Since APFS Encrypted isn't specifically mentioned there, could you try a normal APFS-formatted drive and see if that is detected by the Dropbox desktop application?OK, now I've done it again with APFS. I got the popup when the formatting was finished, before I'd moved anything to the drive. I closed it then (without checking the box) because it's about 800GB of files and I didn't want to slow down my machine the whole day doing the transfer between drives and backup to Dropbox at the same time.
Now the file transfer is done. I've disconnected and reconnected, restarted, renamed the drive on another computer, and I can't get that popup again. Do I really have to reformat the drive just to be able to select this external drive to back up to Dropbox? Thank you for your help!
- Rich
Super User II
Jennifer G.29 wrote:
Now the file transfer is done. I've disconnected and reconnected, restarted, renamed the drive on another computer, and I can't get that popup again.
Check the drive for hidden files. I can't comment on the drive backup function, but when you use Camera Uploads, Dropbox drops a hidden file on the drive to identify it. If you have such a file, delete it and then disconnect/reconnect the drive.
