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jpeduto's avatar
jpeduto
Explorer | Level 4
10 months ago

External Hard Drive compatibility with Dropbox Backup

I am interested in upgrading my plan to the 2TB plan because I need to backup an external hard drive (WD-My Book for Mac) with approximately 600GB of old iPhoto files on it.  I cannot upgrade until I...
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Walter's avatar
Walter
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

Hi there jpeduto - thanks for using Dropbox and welcome to our Community!
 

Storing or backing up your iPhoto files/libraries in Dropbox isn't really recommended. You can have a look at this discussion for some additional information, if you like. 

 

Also note that you can back up the following types of external hard drives to Dropbox Backup on Mac: HFS+, APFS, exFAT, FAT32 while encrypted APFS drives aren't supported.

 

I hope this clarifies matters and please let me know if you have any other questions. 

dangoodall's avatar
dangoodall
New member | Level 2
8 months ago

Walter, Dropbox, encrypted APFS is the recommended standard for external Mac file systems and this is a huge oversight that you appear to be in denial about.

 

You shouldn't really be advertising external drive backup as a gold feature - it's a beta feature if that.

  • kendall0501's avatar
    kendall0501
    New member | Level 2
    7 months ago

    @dangoodall,
    I don't know if you found your solution, but I'm finding DB is kinda like the myth of big Pharma in that they don't want to offer an easy cure (solution), only a way to keep you on the medication (subscription). Easily allowing the back up of DB files to external drives ends DB business model.

  • RoboDrop's avatar
    RoboDrop
    New member | Level 2
    7 months ago

    Ran into this issue the other day. Ended up having to use Google Drive to do the back up, which works seamlessly with an encrypted 4tb external Sandisk G-Drive.  Don't understand why it can't be implemented specially if google have accomplished it. Would prefer to use one cloud provider for everything so might have to reconsider moving back to Google Drive. C'mon dropbox simple features to sort. 😉

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