Offline-only is easy: just move everything into your Documents folder and cancel your account with whatever cloud sync provider you were using 
You can easily restore the old behaviour and get Save As back in all File menus (in fact, it’s so seamless I forgot that Apple had changed this, as once you make the change it sticks through upgrades, etc.):
What if you change the location directory of $HOME/Library/CloudStorage/xxxxx where xxxxx is a folder to a symlink to an external drive?
$ cd ~/Library/CloudStorage
$ cp -R DropBox /Volumes/external/DropBox
$ mv DropBox DropBox.old
$ ln -s /Volumes/external/DropBox DropBox
And if it all works…
$rm -rf ~/Library/CloudStorage DropBox.old
And if it doesn’t work…
$ cd ~/Library/CloudStorage
$ rm DropBox #Symlink
$ mv DropBox.old DropBox
$ rm -rf /Volumes/external/DropBox
It’s been a while since I did Unix shell scripting magic, so there might be syntax errors. But it seems to me this might work. Directory symlinks are normally treated as directories they’re pointing to in Unix except if the process verifies it’s a symlink and not a file. cp command can detect symlinks depending upon the option and so can find.
I did this a few years ago to change around my Desktop Folder. My Desktop Folder was a symlink to point to various Desktop folders I could switch around. The idea is when I was working on a particular project, I could run a shell script to switch my desktop to be the files in that project. I had some app that allowed me to create a desktop menu of shell scripts, and used that to change around the Desktop folder.
Unfortunately, MacOS found the setup too confusing whenever I switched the desktop folder, and I ended up giving it up.
Well, that’s the question. 
The theory is good, but someone needs to test it for real. Since Dropbox has been iffy with symlinks in the past, that’s not something for the faint of heart.
Another View of "Apple … forces … storage changes. " This is not a new problem for user who depend on external drives to hold media files. Apple has done this to several apps they supply. Here is my take on use of an external volume to provide enough storage for media in ~/Library. It could also be used to accommodate a large Dropbox folder within ~/Library.
iTunes managed multiple media types from a single interface with excellent metadata management and location independence for the iTunes folder. (soft links). When Apple dismembered iTunes, it moved Audiobooks, epubs, and pdfs to ~/Library/… This meant, as my library grew, I ran out of space on my DATA volume. My solution was to move my Home directory to an external volume on an external drive. This requires only one edit to System Settings(Preferences) to change the location of the Home directory. This must be done after the old Home directory has been cloned to the new location. I used Carbon Copy Cloner because it preserves essentially everything, including UID, permissions, and softlinks to external Movies, Music, and Pictures folders.
Caveats below do assume modest competence in Terminal and macOS user management. If you lack this, find some who has the competence or solve the space problem by throwing more money at Apple.
Caveats include:
After some time, Delete old Home directory (rm -rf /Users/oldhomediretory)
Regarding updates while main user account is on external volume:
In my experience, major upgrades are almost guaranteed to mess up if this sequence is not followed. Application updates have been no problem.
You need a slash instead of a space between CloudStorage and Dropbox.old, or else you’ll wipe out the whole CloudStorage folder.
@ace ,
What’s your opinion (this is also open for comments from the readers) about a professional design agency storing and actively working on Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign files exclusively on Google Drive? Yes – each designer would, ahead of time, first choose to make their file offline / downloaded locally, then remember to change the file’s status to online-only upon the completion of the project.
I’m interested in feedback about the pitfalls and possible troubles of depending on such an approach. Does anyone know of a design firm that has chosen to operate in this fashion?
Also, I’ve heard that the app entitled Arq will allow for syncing files & folders out on Google Drive with an in-house file server running macOS Server software. Anyone have experience with Arq and Google Drive?
I can’t comment on the File Provider API implementation since it hasn’t rolled out to me yet. But traditional Dropbox (which I’m running) certainly makes that quite easy. Just select “Make available Offline”:
at which point it downloads, you get a solid green circle badge, and it stays offline until you change your mind.
Is this functionality gone under File Provider API?
Yes, that’s the same in the new world order, as I note in the article. But there’s no setting in Dropbox to say that everything should be offline, all the time. You’ll have to make things offline manually. It should stick, but I’m not sure that’s guaranteed.
I’m confused. Here below you can see that you can go all the way up to the top folder and say Make Available Offline (all the time), and you are saying it’s the same in the new world order, but you’re also saying there’s no such setting:
So are you saying that is a recursive command that applied once will then affect any ~/Dropbox/* contents from here on out?
It’s absolutely recursive. You can open the subfolders and their subfolders and see that they all have the green circle badge. And when you “force offline” like this, I don’t think it will ever remove them locally without your permission.
Yes, but when you add new files from another source (not that Mac) will those files automatically be on disk or only in-cloud? I suspect the latter, so you keep having to manually tell new files to download.
What bothers me about this kind of thing is I use cloud-syncing like Dropbox and One Drive as a way to move files around between devices. It’s frustrating when I go to the other device and the files aren’t actually there and I have to do extra steps to force them to download and then wait for that download to happen. I want it to be automatic like in the old days.
I do some photo editing for a community newspaper. Photos that they want me to look at are placed in a folder shared via Dropbox. I set the folder to “Make available offline”. Yes, anything they put in that folder is automatically downloaded to my computer.
One result of all this has changed my own workflow significantly. It used to be that if you changed a file on a Google drive (via Finder overwrite or application save), the new contents became a new version of the old Google drive file. Crucially, the link to the file on Google Drive didn’t change.
Now, such overwrites are new files with new Drive links, meaning any references to the old file (from other documents or web pages or emails or …) give the old contents. Not pleasant.
The workaround is (queue the irony here) to update files only by dropping them into Drive in a web browser. 
It took me a while to figure out that this was going on. Hope I save someone else some time.
Thank you for this article. I ran into problems with Dropbox due to a crash of my iMac (Catalina) & so an upgrade to a Mac mini (Ventura) via my Time Machine back-up. Saved this article for future reference
Interesting, but it didn’t work for me in Ventura. Duplicate remains stubbornly attached to shift- command-s
Note that ‘Save As…’ uses an ellipsis (option-;) not 3 periods.
Excellent thanks. Also found there’s some inconsistency between apps. Some use Save As and some Save as.
Ohhh, new files . Sorry, now I get it.
I was about to reply that it definitely doesn’t apply to new files. And a test shows that moving an online-only DROPBOX file into an offline Dropbox folder doesn’t make it download and become offline.
But strangely, moving a NON-DROPBOX (and therefore offline) file into this same folder doesn’t appear to change anything. The file DOES sync to my other devices, but it doesn’t get a Dropbox badge of any kind. (It has a non-zero file size and Quick View works).
To round out the tests, moving the same NON-DROPBOX (offline) file into an otherwise online-only Dropbox folder again does nothing to the file: no badge, and it stays offline.
So, I’m not sure exactly how to answer the question :-) but I can confidently say it’s not the behavior you’re looking for. Dropbox doesn’t appear to maintain any directory-level rules that it enforces; it simply applies offline/online preferences upon request. Think of it as a lazy parent 
At the risk of being talkative (too late), let me reply to:
Yes, but as we can see, neither is there any such setting in the “old Dropbox”. I think the reason I was confused is because this whole discussion (or so I thought) is about regressions created by the New World Order, and this would not be a regression, at least not for Dropbox.
So if this all behaves the same, then there’s “nothing to see here”, and the discussion should revert back to the pain of forcing all your files under ~/Library, right?
