Not sure if anyone noticed or reported this, but there’s new language that suggests they’re not forcing those of you with Dropbox on external drives to move to FileProvider YET:
Some macOS users with complex configurations—like those storing their Dropbox folder on an external drive—won’t be migrated at this time. These users will continue on their existing Dropbox experience. Learn more about Dropbox for macOS and external drives below.
Notably, you might like seeing these details:
Using external drives with Dropbox for macOS on File Provider
As part of the update to Dropbox for macOS on File Provider, changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported due to a requirement from Apple that all cloud storage provider folders be moved to the user’s Library folder.
We’ve been working on a solution to this with Apple as we migrate users onto Dropbox for macOS on File Provider.
The majority of external drive users aren’t eligible to migrate to Dropbox for macOS on File Provider. However, a small group of external drive users may still receive this update. If you’ve updated to Dropbox for macOS on File Provider but want to change the location of your Dropbox folder back to your external drive, you can do so by following the instructions below.
To log out of your account:
Click the Dropbox icon in the menu bar.
Click your profile picture or initials.
Click Preferences.
Click Account.
Click Signout.
You’ll then be prompted to re-enter your account information.
To log back in to your account:
Click Sign in with Dropbox.
Select how you want to store your files (local or online-only).
Click Next.
Click Advanced settings when you see “You’re almost finished.”
Under Dropbox location, select a folder location.
You can choose to store the Dropbox folder on your external drive from this screen.
If you’re not eligible for the update, you won’t see Get started . Instead, you’ll see a brief explanation of why you’re not eligible to update at this time.
which means I’m stuck in a Catch-22 since the “explanation” is to click the link.
Anyway, I’m not in any rush for the change, especially given the issues. But at least there’s some visibility into the fact that Dropbox is clearly exercising some discretion over which individual clients are being migrated.
Dropbox has been inconsistent on just which computers are forced to move to the File Provider API.
When I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Monterey, Dropbox forced the move. When I upgraded my iMac to Monterey, it didn’t change it, and still hasn’t. And then when migrated the MBP (with Dropbox in cloud storage) to a new MBP running Ventura, Dropbox reverted back to the old way.
Personally, I don’t like the new system, because Dropbox says that while you can change all of your folders and files to stay on device, new items will default to cloud only. I don’t want cloud only. I want what Dropbox originally was: just a folder, that syncs.
I recently replaced my iMac with a new Mac mini. The iMac was “maxed out” at Ventura; and the mini surprisingly shipped with (only) Ventura. I used Migration Assistant to move my data to the mini.
I was naturally concerned what shenanigans Dropbox might pull; so when I looked under the Dropbox menu, sure enough I found the message “Dropbox for macOS on File Provider is now ready. Update Dropbox to use it on the latest version…”. I was glad it gave me a choice, and I did NOT proceed with that upgrade.
Meanwhile, I continued tidying up my new Mac, getting things working, etc. Part of that was upgrading to Sonoma. When I went back into the settings of Dropbox, I noticed it said the previously mentioned (and linked) “you are not eligible for… File Provider”, like it used to say on my iMac.
I’m not sure why Dropbox was flipping around. I don’t know if it had to do with the Sonoma upgrade. Or perhaps after migration, Dropbox maybe did a fresh sync of everything?? I don’t know.
I’ll try to be brief, because everyone has so much to say on this subject.
I upgraded to Dropbox File Provider in June of this year and reverted back to the old-style Dropbox in August. Some of the issues I had:
Time Machine bloats because every file needs to be backed up again at its new location.
Synching can be very slow, and Dropbox will say “Your files are up to date” even when they aren’t. (The latter is also a problem with old-style Dropbox), and then you will have lots of sync conflicts if you opened any files.
The folder ~/Library/Group Containers had at one time 363 GB of, seemingly, cached material in it.
I had to work at a friend’s house who has very limited internet, so I turned off Dropbox and copied 20–30 GB of photos to my Dropbox. When I got home, Dropbox for File Provider told me that it had to sync 602,000 files. I had to wait a day before I could use my computer. And at least one of the files was synched with an ownership that didn’t allow me to open it and that needed to be fixed with the command line.
Once, on reboot, many of my apps wouldn’t launch, but some would. I finally figured out that the problem apps all wanted to open a file that they remembered was open when I quit, and that file was on Dropbox. Simultaneously, fileproviderd and syspolicyd were pegged at 100% CPU usage. A reboot fixed this.
Dropbox for File Provider doesn’t do local synching, but only syncs from Dropbox servers, so is much, much slower (if you have another computer at home using the same Dropbox, old-style Dropbox can sync using the faster local network).
After trying to figure out these problems, I reinstalled Dropbox for File Provider on a fast computer (Mac Studio) with a fast internet connection (1 Mb/s), and after 18 hours, Dropbox was saying it had 1 or 2 files left to sync, and it kept up that message for hours, continually finding new files to sync. Of course, if I opened anything while in this state, I just created a sync conflict.
After reinstalling Dropbox for File Provider, I couldn’t use the Open File dialog to choose 100s or 1000’s of files at one time, the chooser just was so slow as to be unusable.
I finally gave up, and reverted to the old style Dropbox (not an easy thing to figure out), and instead of copying my Dropbox from ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/ to ~/Dropbox, it deleted the old folder and redownloaded the new one from the web. (EDIT, it actually just set all files to Available Online Only, and then I had to change that setting.) This means that all custom icons were deleted, and old (System 9 era) files lost their application associations. So after restoring from Dropbox, I had to then restore from a Time Machine backup to get all the metadata straight.
My Dropbox at that time was about 1 TB, so every one of these problems caused days of pain.
I know that sooner or later Apple will make me use Dropbox for File Provider. Maybe I’ll be lucky and have a fatal heart attack before then.
Thanks for this fantastic field experience! These are exactly my concerns, after I tried to switch from Dropbox to iCloud Drive a few years ago and my (large number of) files became hijacked for days while iCloud got stuck syncing in ways Dropbox never did.
Bottom line: I don’t think Apple knows how to do reliable, large-scale syncing reliably the way Dropbox does. Not yet at least. That’s why they tried to buy Dropbox. And yea, I might have to die trying to stay off File Provider.
My (non-Apple) friend uses his Synology to do a home-grown cloud file solution, and he’s adding off-site protection (per my urging) by now syncing to a friend’s Synology. I have no idea if this performs better than the two candidates mentioned here. But like an underground bunker full of canned goods, I’m going to hold onto this option as a survival strategy in the event of a Cloud Storage Apocalypse (aka, “File Provider”)
