I get a prompt after every boot asking me to attach an already attached external drive

eebclee

In the last year or so, every time I reboot my Mac Studio and log in, I instantly get the attached popup asking me to attach an already attached external drive. This never used to happen on my previous Intel iMac Pro. Going over the logs it looks clear Dropbox is trying to access the drive before it's been mounted by the OS. In this case the drives are in an external 4 bay OWC enclosure (the same one that worked fine on the Intel Mac) and spinning up all the drives and mounting can take about 30 seconds.

Is this normal for the current version of MacOS Dropbox, and do I need to just not let it automatically start at boot and start it manually each time? (Or write a script to start it 60 seconds after login?)

As a bonus, I tried moving the repository to an encrypted disk and switching to the File Provider version to see if that helps, and now Dropbox spends about 12 hours indexing on every boot.

Jay

Hi @eebclee, thanks for messaging the Community.

From what you're describing, this seems to be the expected behavior of the Dropbox desktop application.

If the external drive which contains the Dropbox folder isn't mounted at the time the desktop app loads, then you would receive this prompt, since the folder is 'missing'. As to why this didn't occur on the previous Mac, I wouldn't be able to say. Perhaps the desktop app loaded a little later than normal, and that was enough time for the drive to be mounted.

To prevent this from occurring in the future, I'd recommend delaying the startup of the Dropbox desktop app by a minute or so, giving the drives enough time to spin up. You could do this by creating a script, or by disabling the automatic startup and manually starting up the app when you need to use it.

If you need any further assistance, please let me know.