Dropbox is moving their folder, and you can't change it

Thanks for your note.

You may have missed my point #2 :-) Note that most Dropbox users have the free tier. That’s a loss leader that is designed to drive you to upgrade, and Dropbox aggressively pushes you to upgrade, even to people like me who are already paying for the 3TB plan!

For now, few have heard of Maestral. Combining that with the friction of downloading and using a 3rd party client makes them a small threat. But Twitterrific became wildly popular, and that was that.

I did miss that. But I noticed that the free tier is only 2GB, which isn’t very much, except for the most casual uses these days. It doesn’t take more than a small number of documents (especially documents with a lot of embedded graphical content) to start approaching that limit. So that alone may be sufficient reason for those who like the service to upgrade to a paid plan.

FWIW, Microsoft OneDrive’s free tier is 5GB, but even that’s just barely useful for non-trival uses. But I suspect most OneDrive users have the 1TB storage that is bundled with an Office 365 subscription. I know I would never have created an account if not for that bundle. (And I don’t have any system integration - I only access it via the web interface.)

It would be interesting to see stats about how many active users they have subscribed at each tier. I did find one article which points out that (in 2020), they had 700M users, but only 15.5M paying users. Which isn’t a high percentage (about 2.2%), but it says nothing about how many of those non-paying users actually use the service, vs. those that tried it and decided not to use it, but didn’t close the account because it’s free.

Are there any drawbacks or disadvantages to Maestral or is it pretty much plug and play?

It was plug and play for me. I don’t rely on any ‘fancy’ Dropbox features. I need it to sync simple documents (mostly text, png, jpeg, and pdf) between my Macs and my iPhone. And it needs to sync app folders for collaborative tools like Overleaf — I have tens of thousands of LaTeX docs and yet that’s still a far cry from the 2 GB Dropbox free limit. I’m definitely not some kind of Dropbox power user, but for my daily use Maestral has yet to disappoint me. And it liberates me from all the feature creep and shenanigans that Dropbox has shoved in users’ faces over the past few years.

7 posts were split to a new topic: Dropbox ending support for Sierra in June 2023

Thanks Simon…we pay for the 2TB option but like you we’re not using anything remotely close to all of it…but we needed more than 2GB free and wife and I share an account between 8 total devices. I’ll have to download it and see if it’s worth switching…but like other comments we don’t know how long it will be until either Apple or DB closes the loophole.

And despite being up to date on the DB app on my M1 MBP last week with it still in home directory…I now have the notification on the DB menubar icon on it…despite it being the exact same version of the app that is on my Studio and that one got forced to CloudStorage weeks and several app versions ago…very strange.

There is one, but perhaps it’s a minor one. If you have any symlinks in your Dropbox folders, you will get a sync error from the computer where you’ve added the symlink. The Dropbox API will not allow symlinks to be uploaded.

I see this sometimes because I have a folder that I call “Install Files”, which, as it may sound, I use to store (and sync) the install files for apps that I use. Of course if I need an app install for a current app, I’ll just download the latest, but occasionally I’ll need to install something old, or go back to an older version for some reason, so I keep them around. For the most part, this is fine; most of these are .dmg or .zip files and they sync just fine with Maestral. However, sometimes I’ll have an .app file that I can just drag in to the Applications folder, and these files (because they are package files I assume which have embedded symlinks) will give me sync errors with Maestral.

There is an obvious workaround - zipping the files and deleting the .app - but that, so far, is the only thing I’ve noticed with Maestral that has caused any sort of sync error.

Thanks Doug…I’m not really considering not using the DB app at this point, just putting info in the info locker for possible future needs.

Sorry, if I missed something but I searched the entire topic without a result.

My biggest issue after the Dropbox update is that obviously Spotlight is no longer able to indicate the new folder. Before the update it behaved like any other folder and I was able to search for files and folders which immediately stopped working after the update.

Is this just my experience or is there a workaround?

Oh lord that would be a catastrophic disaster. Since mine hasn’t updated yet, I can’t confirm.

I’m not sure what you mean. Do you mean you can’t find the Dropbox folder itself? Or you can’t search the contents of the Dropbox folder? I have no trouble searching for files in the Dropbox folder. I don’t think I’ve had any reason to search for the Dropbox folder itself since it is in the Finder sidebar.

That’s the case. I don’t use spotlight to find main folders or even applications like shown in many YouTube videos.

This morning I ran a Google search and it looks like I’m not alone…

This thread continues from November 2022 until now and there doesn’t seem to be a reliable solution to fix it. :roll_eyes:

If this is true, I’m speechless. I effectively put my entire home directory in Dropbox. To have Spotlight fail to index that after “the upgrade” would be like stepping back >20 years in technology.

I read a bunch of posts more and indeed one user provided a solution which worked for me on two different MacBooks which both were suffering from this problem over Months now since I didn’t had time before to take care about it.

You first know how cool Spotlight works after this (quite unnecessary) experience. :roll_eyes:

Thanks and have a great weekend everyone. :wink: :sunny:

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Spotlight searching seems to work perfectly well (at least, as well as it ever did) for me under Ventura (Dropbox 172.4.7555)

I wonder if this could be resolved by performing the same steps with just:

~/Library/CloudStorage

rather than the entire drive.

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I just tried it with the Dropbox folder itself which didn’t help. Also the re-indexing routine from Clean My Mac didn’t work even though it was recommended from another user in the same thread.

I’m just happy that it worked for me using the entire drive and I think refreshing the Spotlight indexing this way has no disadvantage.

Hmm, should this trouble me?

This could be totally unrelated to the current topic. But note that my Dropbox still has not migrated my data out of my home directory, the way they claimed they would. Having read this bug(?) / behavior change, I’m wondering if that was impacting my experience, and if upgrading my OS is going to finally move my Dropbox…?

I don’t think it should trouble you. This just means that apps can sync data using iCloud even if your organization has a policy that disables iCloud Drive. Previously apps that tried to sync would get an error.

Apps can sync data to iCloud without exposing the data files to iCloud Drive. Just as the Notes app, Reminders, Calendar, and other stock apps do.

Just as an example, I use the journaling app DayOne. Their data doesn’t appear in iCloud Drive, but it still syncs to my other devices (iPhone, iPad, and my Macs).

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my Dropbox still has not migrated my data out of my home directory, the way they claimed they would. Having read this bug(?) / behavior change, I’m wondering if that was impacting my experience, and if upgrading my OS is going to finally move my Dropbox…?

I don’t think it’s related. I think Dropbox is taking its time rolling out the new client. One of my Macs only switched to the new Dropbox last week, even though it has been on Ventura almost as long as Ventura was released.