We are aware of the issue with the badge emails resending to everyone, we apologise for the inconvenience - learn more here.
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...
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.
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox Staff Hi 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?
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.
- JayThe way the external drive backup works is by the unique identifier in the drive itself. If the drive was renamed, this might not be enough to be seen as a different device.
Can I ask why you want to backup the external drive on another machine? Did you change the files in the drive itself?I am having the same issue: Connecting an external hard drive doesn't trigger dropbox to prompt for backup.
I've tried to search for hidden files in the drive root, but can't find anything dropbox related (I only see .DS_Store and .localized).
I've also tried changing the drive UUID (similar to what is listed here https://superuser.com/questions/127191/how-does-one-change-the-uuid-of-a-volume-on-mac-os-x-10-6, but using apfs.util). I can confirm that the UUID changed, but I still don't get a prompt for dropbox.
Is there no way to tell dropbox to backup an external drive without having to wait for it to prompt me? My wife just purchased 2TB of dropbox space for this feature alone, and now she can't use it.
Please advise.
