Apparently, 4D uses paths like you see in Terminal, not what the user sees in the Sidebar or folder. And, Terminal adds the email address of the user to the end of the Drive folder name. Not all systems have the same Google Account as the name of the computer user. So, we are trying to overcome this naming convention and still find the path.
To be clear, this is a limitation of our database software, not the macOS or Google. But our workflows are broken regardless of who is not keeping up with the program!
Could you put an alias (or Unix symbolic link) in the place 4D is looking that points to the ~/Library/CloudStorage folder? That way 4D will use the path to the alias/symlink and be served up the Google Drive files.
Yea, you nailed it. This is all part of an initiative to back port iOS-based architecture to macOS. This is generally a healthy initiative, since the Mac has a lot to learn from the much more modern architecture on the mobile side. But they have either lost sight of the fact that this particular change creates a functionality regression for Mac users, or they simply don’t care.
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My article on this is now live, including an explanation about how the cloud storage services appear in the home folder and in ~/Library (it’s symlinks, of course).
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…and you did some fine research on this! Nice work!
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Thankyou Adam. How about Sync mentioned here on your site as a Dropbox alternative. Will it move to the same locaton?
Best, Patrick
I use Sync as well, and it continues to allow you to select your own location, like Maestral does for Dropbox files. From what I can tell, Sync has never used a kext, so perhaps they’ll continue to be able to allow files to be located at the user’s choice. There is nothing other web site that mentions any coming changes to their Mac client.
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I use Sync as well, and it continues to allow you to select your own location, like Maestral does for Dropbox files. From what I can tell, Sync has never used a kext, so perhaps they’ll continue to be able to allow files to be located at the user’s choice. There is nothing other web site that mentions any coming changes to their Mac client.
I submitted a request to Sync for clarification…will let everyone know what the response is.
I am just not going to upgrade. I have held off for months and plan to. These changes seem unhelpful and counter-intuitive. Learning to ignore that red numbered flag on my Dropbox icon.
And if you do grow tired of trying to ignore that red badge, perhaps you can try Maestral instead.
So Simon, let me ask about this. There are at least 3 reasons I would hesitate before swapping in a 3rd party Dropbox client:
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Cloud providers have a bad history of pulling their APIs that allow for 3rd party clients. Think Twitter and Google Maps for starters.
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Dropbox is a huge business. I don’t understand their entire business model, but I’d be surprised if their client wasn’t part of the equation, if only to keep prompting you to a) upgrade, and b) start auto-syncing your photos, etc, thereby cornering you a position where you have to upgrade
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More to the current topic, Dropbox doesn’t appear to be moving this folder because they want to, but because Apple is making them do it. If that’s the case, how optimistic should we be that everyone else isn’t headed this way?
Perhaps other apps will try to avoid the File Provider API, but they will also lose the “seamless experience” (per Dropbox) that goes with it, though I’m not sure what that is. But it may include Finder/Search integration. We have already seen Dropbox warning users for the past few months that as of Ventura(?), some apps are not able to properly open files that are “online only”. This is where OS-level support is critical, and “rolling your own” will be fraught with problems. If an app uses approved APIs to open files and Dropbox uses approved APIs to sync, then the OS can ensure that even a Zero KB online-only file that an app tries to open can do so in a way that opaques the underlying storage and sync model.
I’m not an expert here, but these are the patterns I’ve seen play out many times over the years.
My OP link now has some new details about this move. TLDR: it’s almost all bad news:
They’re almost all regressions, apparently due to compatibility issues.
But the one that’s really frightening me is this one:
Actions involving a large number of files can take longer than usual to complete. * Syncing or updating a Dropbox account with over 300,000 files can take a long period of time.
Recall what I ranted about above:
It sounds like they are now coming clean that EXACTLY what I feared is about to happen and that yes, it’s an Apple problem.
This is worst case scenario because it means that arguably the #1 player in sync is now being dumbed down for compatibility reasons. This could put all the 3rd parties on the fritz, either by directly putting them out of business or reducing their added value to nothing more than you can get with iCloud Drive, the only first class citizen in this game.
If I’m wrong, then yay! My life will be so much better. But if I’m right, the Internet should be sounding the alarms and crying foul.
Maestral describes exactly what the limitations are:
Currently, Maestral does not support Dropbox Paper, the management of Dropbox teams and the management of shared folder settings. If you need any of this functionality, please use the Dropbox website or the official client.
Maestral uses the public Dropbox API which, unlike the official client, does not support transferring only those parts of a file which changed (“binary diff”). Maestral may therefore use more bandwidth that the official client. However, it will avoid uploading or downloading a file if it already exists with the same content locally or in the cloud.
That latter may be an issue if you have a lot of large files that frequently have small changes. Obviously the official client will be more efficient.
And, right, I can’t right-click on a file and have it give me a Dropbox sharing link right from the Finder. If you need to do that, I’d say that the official client is better for you. (I have never needed to do that; if I ever do, I can just go to the Dropbox website and do it there.)
Among the benefits:
- Less memory usage: 100 MB for a medium sized Dropbox on macOS vs 500 MB). The memory usage will depend on the size of your synced Dropbox folder and can be further reduced when running the daemon without a GUI.
- Supports syncing multiple Dropbox accounts by running multiple instances in parallel.
- Does not count towards the three devices limit for basic Dropbox accounts.
And, of course, you can chose where to sync the files. (Maestral does still give you the ability to make a folder online-only and not sync to the computer; useful for people who use Arq and backup to their Dropbox account, as you won’t need to download those files, or even see them, on your local computer.
Sure, it’s possible that Dropbox will do something with their API that somehow blocks Maestral, but that would affect apps like Arq, MoneyDance, etc., which use the API to store files with Dropbox directly.
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There’s a big difference between a client for a free service. The service provider needs to get paid somehow and it is probably via advertisements and/or tracking data. A third-party client could easily circumvent some or all of this.
On the other hand, if you’ve got a paid-up subscription service, they are getting paid no matter what client you use, even if you stop using the service altogether (until you actually cancel the account, of course). So there’s less incentive for them to capriciously block a third-party client.
Of course, management (at all companies) changes over time and the new boss might not be “same as the old boss”. 
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.
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.