Update!
Dropbox has been working fine. My main gripe is that the “Recents” section on my Phone’s Dropbox app is now clogged with Arq backup files, ruining my ability to use it to find things I’m looking for.
In a related topic, I was getting ready to get rid of this Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017 iMac because it became so slow. I was pretty sure it was the drive, but people wanted $500-600 to replace it. (Nope, I’m not ripping off that screen myself). So I tried hanging a USB-C external NVMe drive off and booting from that. That continued to be unreliable. Mac kept crashing and I’d find it rebooted. Seems like the drive would lose connectivity. Swapping the cable and port didn’t help.
I had already bought an M2 laptop to replace it. But that gorgeous screen! Plus it has 24GB RAM. Tried to at least use it as an external display. Doesn’t support Target Display Mode, but I found some third party solutions that have potential (perhaps another post/article about that). I also wanted to keep the iMac as backup server. But with the iMac crashing, all these ideas were not going to work.
So I was getting ready to sell it.
Finally, I decided to try one other thing. I confess that I’ve enjoyed being ignorant about the difference between Thunderbolt and USB-C, since the connectors are compatible. But I now have multiple external NVMe drives (since Glenn’s(?) article a year or so back). And I had gotten a (pricey!) Thunderbolt enclosure for the one as he recommended. The others I got USB-C enclosures; they were much cheaper and have worked fine.
But as I started moving drives around and the Thunderbolt drive wouldn’t work on some of my USB-C Macs, I learned to look for the “thunder bolt” icon to tell me whether to expect them to work. (Sorry if you guys already knew this. I thought the Thunderbolt enclosure would at least fall back to USB-C, but I guess not. Call me slow!). So while both enclosures were supported on my iMac, I realized that the iMac’s port might be unhappy about talking to a USB-C boot drive connected to a Thunderbolt port. It shouldn’t be; it should be supported I believe. And it worked sometimes; but not consistently.
So I took my boot NVMe drive out of that USB-C enclosure and swapped it with my Photos drive that was in my Thunderbolt enclosure, and tried booting from the Thunderbolt enclosure (plugged into the Thunderbolt port) on the iMac. The result has been 100% solid and super fast! I’ve got my iMac back. It’s a whole new computer. All because I changed the enclosure for the external boot drive.
So that’s a mini success story of its own. But the reason it’s fair to put it here is because I checked my Arq/Dropbox logs, and they appear to have been taking around ~1 hour to run (daily). But before they were anywhere from 5-25 hours, probably depending on whether it was pruning. I don’t have data to support it, but I think this improvement aligns in time with when I changed the boot drive from Internal to External/Thunderbolt/NVMe. (Backups never worked reliably during the interim with the USB-C drive).
So the lesson is that Thunderbolt 3 may work better for you than USB-C, or at least on a Thunderbolt Port. Or at the very least, don’t assume that you’ll get the same results with each.
Another lesson is to remember that I/O is often the killer on old computers, and you can often breathe new life into an oldie if you can get it to run on a fast drive.
Thanks for listening and maybe this helps someone!
