Just curious if any has experienced issues with Dropbox after upgrading to Tahoe 26.5?
Hey @JCheng - thanks for using Dropbox and posting on our Community!
While I'm not aware of any issues with Mac OS 26.5 (Tahoe) at the moment, there have been some reports in the past that coincided with an OS update.
You should be able to find some relevant threads by searching on our Community, if you'd like to take a look that is.
I know it's not much, but I hope this helps to some extent. Please let us know if anything else comes up.
Hello, I’m a longtime professional Dropbox user running a serious Adobe editorial workflow (InDesign/InCopy with linked assets, fonts, scripts, archives, etc.) on macOS Tahoe, and I want to express some concerns about the current File Provider integration.
I recently rebuilt my entire Mac Studio from scratch because attempts to use Dropbox in legacy/non-File Provider mode became unstable and ultimately unworkable for professional production use. Problems included:
After a complete wipe/reinstall, modern File Provider mode is now stable enough to use professionally, but several issues remain deeply frustrating.
My biggest concern is conceptual and operational ambiguity around file locality.
I explicitly mark files and folders “Make Available Offline,” and they receive green checkmarks, yet they still display cloud icons and sometimes re-enter a “hydrating” or spinning-clock state when accessed. This creates uncertainty about whether files are genuinely local or still dependent on some hidden reconciliation process.
As someone working professionally with InDesign/InCopy collaboration workflows, deterministic local file behavior matters enormously:
The current iconography and File Provider semantics obscure these distinctions instead of clarifying them.
Another major frustration is that Tahoe’s cloud orchestration layer appears to introduce large amounts of metadata/state overhead even for tiny files. For example, screenshots only a few KB in size can appear to “sync” or “hydrate” for surprisingly long periods despite a wired gigabit ethernet connection and fully local storage.
From the user perspective, it increasingly feels like:
rather than:
I also strongly dislike that Dropbox storage is categorized under macOS “System Data” rather than Documents or user storage, because it obscures what is actually occupying disk space.
To be clear:
But the overall experience has become much less transparent and much less legible to professional users who depend on coherent filesystem semantics.
What I want most is:
I suspect many longtime professional Mac users feel similarly, especially those in publishing, editorial, design, and production workflows.
I also want to emphasize another major source of frustration: under Tahoe/File Provider, I no longer have a clear understanding of how much SSD space Dropbox is actually consuming locally.
Under the older Dropbox model, this was conceptually straightforward:
Under the current architecture:
As a professional user managing hundreds of gigabytes of editorial/design assets, I need to understand what is physically resident on my machine.
At the moment, the system increasingly feels like an abstraction layer hiding the actual state of storage rather than clearly communicating it.
Is there any reliable Dropbox-recommended method under Tahoe to determine:
Right now the ambiguity itself is becoming one of the biggest workflow stressors.
Hello, The only way I've been able to get Dropbox to play nice with Tahoe is the nuclear option of wiping my drive entirely and reinstalling everything from scratch. It works, but I have many caveats about it, including simple things like the icons under Apple's API. I get the green checkmarks, but also the cloud downloads, which don't seem to match. Above all, I'm struggling with the conceptual opacity of Dropbox under Tahoe/File Provider. Under the old Dropbox model, it was very easy to understand what was actually happening: online-only files were visibly 0 KB placeholders, local files occupied local disk space, and Finder generally reflected physical reality. Now, cloud-only folders can still display their full logical size, files marked “Available Offline” sometimes appear to re-enter hydration or reconciliation states, and huge amounts of storage seem to disappear into macOS “System Data” without any clear indication of what Dropbox is actually consuming locally.
As someone managing hundreds of gigabytes of editorial and design assets in professional Adobe workflows, I need to understand what is physically resident on my machine and what is not. At the moment, the distinction between logical cloud size, actual local storage, purgeable cache data, and guaranteed offline data feels extremely unclear. The system increasingly feels like an abstraction layer that hides the real state of storage rather than communicating it transparently.
More than the syncing itself, which seems technically functional, the real source of stress is the ambiguity. I no longer feel confident answering simple questions like: how much SSD space is Dropbox truly using, which files are genuinely guaranteed local, and whether “Available Offline” actually means permanently pinned to disk in the traditional sense.
Lastly, everything becomes even less clear now that Dropbox documents are simply a part of "System Data" in the hard drive.
Thank you for the detailed reply and sharing your thoughts on this @nyo23 - most appreciated.
When it comes to the first set of your queries, I'd suggest that you take a look at this help center article which outlines the sync icons and their use. What icons are your files showing when you see them syncing upon opening them?
As for understanding how much hard drive space is used, would the sync and storage dashboard help at all?
