MacOS 13.0 Ventura, and Dropbox follows OneDrive in forcing the folder on the system drive

Hello, and thanks for replying.

Keeping aligned will ensure the continued existence of Dropbox on macOS, but as for the “best possible experience”, I mean yes, emphasis on “possible” as in “the one that is allowed to be”, and i realize Dropbox had limited pushback in this or we wouldn’t be in this situation, but I tell you, I will not spend thousands of euros to get a Mac with a larger internal drive just so i can run the cloud service that I’m already paying for fully local.

This is going to end in tears for a lot of people.

davidarden

Any chance you can elaborate here? I'm on the latest version of Monterey. I only care about one subfolder (approx 80gbs) to be 100% offline. All the others can stay off my device unless specifically called upon. That's how dropbox is operating currently. Would this change if I upgraded to ventura?

I don’t know, do you have enough space on the system drive to hold these 80GBs and more? Because while I assume the client will keep having an option to designate files and folders as always available offline, the fact of the matter is that the cloud management API of macOS will have the last say and may offload some files to the cloud to make room for others if it deems it necessary, and if the experience with OneDrive which Microsoft adapted to this API already with Monterey is anything to go by, control over one’s files will become an uncertain thing at best. I just have a Windows machine to keep a local copy on both cloud services, because it’s clear Apple is so sold on the idea of files on-demand that they won’t let you have it on their systems.

davidarden

Ahhh, understood. This is very helpful! Yeah I've never liked how iCloud handled offline storage. You seem to abdicating a great amount of control to Apple. Shame essentially all cloud storage systems will have to fold into this system. Appreciate the help, brother.

dom burgess

This is an AWFUL idea. I work for a media company of nearly 100 people, all using Dropbox. We have a giant Dropbox of about 100TB (yes, TB...not a typo). Due to the large file sizes we use, we HAVE to use external drives and this change makes Dropbox unusable for us. I highly suspect we will be moving to a different service.

After all the money we've given Dropbox, this is a huge disappointment.

BJRo

Dropbox was synching fine, and then I opted to relink it after moving it. Now Dropbox wants to store 100+GB in my Library folder? What the f? Anyone have a fix to this?

No fix, sorry, even if they were to allow a different folder it would really only be symlinks to the Library folder.

Hi All,

Now I am replying to this thread, but with a caveat of "I haven't tried this yet", and I'm even a little hesitant to try it myself - but I probably will - and it is consistent with (I think) both a) Apple's preferred arrangements, and b) Dropbox's compliance with Apple's approach / APIs.

Firstly, let me say my current Dropbox installation is working, and is on an external, non-System Drive, and contains a very large number of "local" documents - well over 1 TB. So given I have a 512 GB iMac, clearly, it's been impossible to host the Dropbox folder on the System Drive for some time.

But also, my User's Home Directory itself has been getting problematically large for some time - as I'm sure many with a space constrained Mac will recognize. So, my suggestion is in two parts. The first of which is certainly not for the faint hearted. You can move your User's Home Directory to an second drive - and on a laptop, even to an external drive - as dangerous as that sounds - because obviously, you'll ALWAYS need that external drive attached to log in as that user ... AND that drive MUST be a very fast drive ... Don't use a spinning HDD, it must be SSD for reasonable performance.

I won't clog up this post with the details of doing this - which aren't trivial, and there's a few gotchas along the way - such as make sure you create a second Admin level user on your machine, just in case you were ever caught in a situation where your external drive couldn't be attached, and you needed to do something with Admin privileges. The following link contains a pretty good roadmap of how to do it. move-macs-home-folder-new-location-2260157

Having done that, the location of where Dropbox should offer to place your Dropbox folder should be - I hope - ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox - which - and this is the bit I haven't tested yet - should be under your newly re-located Home Profile Directory, on the - remember my earlier very strong recommendation, very fast external SSD you're using for it.

Once again, I can't emphasise enough, this is at this stage a theoretical solution to this issue at this stage - I haven't tried it, but I'm strongly considering it, because, I came to the forum looking for an answer to why Dropbox isn't showing the little green sync ticks ... And now I think I know why? The APIs it's using to do that have almost certainly changed, to conform to the way Apple is now doing it.

Of course, the stumbling block might be, that Dropbox ignores the Home Directory Redirection I've got configured - surely not - and tries to create a directory such as <<boot drive>>/Users/<<user name>>/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox ... Now that would be disappointing!

Interested in others thoughts on this.

Cheers,

It’s something I have considered, along with, well, the more straightforward option (from a macOS POV) of actually booting from an external drive, but there was the rub again, it ought to be fast, even more than for your proposed solution, so a Thunderbolt 3 case for an NVMe unit, and that gets costly, to the point that I start considering giving back the M1 mini for when an M2 one is released and i go for the 2TB option…once again, this is piling money to apple upon the money for Dropbox and all of this because Apple deprecated a system that might not even break anything, but they’re such control freaks. Ah well, if you try it let us know how it goes, I’ll keep it in mind as well.

Hi There,

Yes, booting from an alternative System drive, so your home folder / location of DropBox folder is on that alternative / external / fast / larger drive certainly is a good alternative ... I guess my situation evolved over time, as the amount of stuff I have in Dropbox grew, and as the volume of stuff in my Mac Home Profile grew. So my solution was effectively a multiple-step solution.

And in answer to your other question, I actually did jump in and tried what I suggested in my previous post:

Unlinked Dropbox,
Signed back in, and
Sure enough, the default location Dropbox suggested for the Dropbox Folder was in my relocated Home Folder on the external drive ...

So, I think that means it has been created in the "recommended / correct" location ... hopefully ... It's currently syncing down, which given my reasonable internet speed shouldn't take too long ... Obviously it's a bit wasteful having to re-synchronise, but I'll leave it now, and wait for it to complete. I'll report back whether it actually solves the issue I originally was concerned about - the absence of the sync indicators on the folders / files.

Andrew Parker

Yep, it's huge pain, see my post here – https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Apps-and-Installations/DropBox-Unusable/td-p/635372

Hi All,

Just reporting whether the steps I took did address my original concern - the complete absence of the green "synchronised" indicators on my Dropbox folders under Ventura, and seeing whether relocating the Dropbox folder into the recommended Home Profile location would resolve that. Well the news is both good and bad ...

Firstly, having moved the location of my Dropbox folder into the "recommended" location - inside my external SSD based Home Profile folder and re-syncing, the performance is great - despite the tedious requirement to resync completely.
At first I thought that it hadn't fixed the sync indicators situation at all, but today, I started noticing that they were "re-appearing" - at the "leaf" nodes of the very substantial set of files I have - i.e. at the documents within the lowest level of the folder tree.
Then as I progressed up those trees, with all files downloaded and local, the directories the indicators "percolated" up the tree.
That is until you get to the very top-level of the folders directly under my Dropbox Folder ... they never seem to show a green indicator, even though every folder under them, is showing a green indicator.

Dropbox Screen Shot.jpg

So I'm not sure whether that is something that will resolve itself over time, as the sync indicators appearing sometime post the initial re-syncing did ... I'll wait and see. At least seeing the sync indicators at the lower levels is part way to what I was hoping to achieve.

Walter

Hey @treeandrew, could you send us a screenshot of the app's exact status as shown in your menu bar at the moment?

Is it 'up to date' or still syncing perhaps?

Hey Walter,

No, it's been up to date for several days. And I note that the behaviour of the "sync" indicators appearing from the lowest level files seems to be quite inconsistent unfortunately. Here's the screenshot you requested.

Dropbox Screen Shot # 2.jpg

Here is another view as I traverse the folder view this morning, which suggests that the "percolation" of the synchronised status "up the folder tree" has "stalled" somehow?

Dropbox Screen Shot # 3.jpg

Note how the sync indicators are only present for some of the folders at a particular level, however if I select any of those folders not showing the sync indicators, all of the folders and documents below them are synchronised.

So the behaviour is certainly not consistent.

Martin R.19

Hello to the Community, hello Dropbox Staff,

I'm running Dropbox 160.4.4703 under MacOS 13.0.1. (Ventura) with OpenCore Legacy Patcher on a late 2013 iMac (27"). I also use Boxcryptor for the Dropboxfolder. That works all like charme while I'm now waiting for the expected changes by Dropbox, moving the Dropbox folder to ~/Library/CloudStorage. So far Dropbox did not force an update and if it's up to me that never needs to happen anyway... 😉

By the way, just to avoid any misunderstanding: does "~/Library/CloudStorage" mean the library folder in the user directory or at "Macintosh HD/Library"?

Is there anything I can do to prepare in advance such as moving my Dropbox folder to the new location ~/Library/CloudStorage already manually?

What are your recommendations to make the change as smooth and less annoying as possible.

I use the Thunderbird mail client and have my complete mail directory in the Dropbox folder. That will need to get adjusted/re-linked of course.

I also use Windows 10 under Parallels 18 on same machine and use the Dropbox folder directory as network folder there. So that needs to get modified later as well.

In my Dropboxfolder I have a folder with movies (approx. 500 GB) but they are all marked "online only". Hopefully this will help to speed up the move.

Is it recommended to put all files on "online only" before starting the move? Will this make things going faster and avoid problems better? I mean, if all files are "online only" the local process of the move by Dropbox should go much faster as there won't be endless consequent synchronization involved. I prefer to do the synchronization later manually myself for only those files that I need offline.

Is it probably a good idea to delete my "older" Dropbox version, move the Dropbox folder directory to the new location ~/Library/CloudStorage (how to name the folder there?) and then install the latest version of Dropbox again, that will then use the new location?

Would be great if you guys at Dropbox can give me some recommendations.

Thanks & Regards,

Martin

Megan

Hey @Martin R.19, I hope you're doing well!

You had some very interesting, and on point questions there. As long as your app is up to date, the migration will be as seamless as possible. You don't need to follow any particular process on your end, or move the folder beforehand since our app will take care of everything.

What we want is to provide the best possible experience for all our customers going through this change, and that's what we'll try to do in your case as well.

In regards to keeping your all folders as online-only, that would do no harm, since it'll help the app re-index content possibly faster. We want to hope that we got it all covered on our end, and that's why we're working so hard on this every day.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Walter

A file or folder with no icon means that it has been opened either by double-clicking or through a third-party application and synced .

“Synced” means that any changes you made to this file or folder are reflected everywhere you access your files in Dropbox. While this file or folder is stored on your device, it can be made online-only by right clicking and selecting Make online-only.

For folders, no icon means there is at least one available file in the folder, but no online-only files. There can also be files that are available offline in the folder.

An online-only file or folder can be made available by clicking on the“Online-only” icon.

Also note that if your computer is low on hard drive space, these files can automatically change to online-only to free up space from time to time.

I hope this clears things up a tad @treeandrew

Hi Walter,

Thanks for your reply, but I'm not sure your explanation either matches my scenario, or clarifies things for me.

I'm certainly not sure what I'm seeing is consistent with what you've described, particularly given I have other Macs with matching file structure / settings that certainly aren't displaying the same behaviour - all "green icons" are displayed as they always were - present on all files / folders at all levels. Of course, it may be that I need to a full / complete re-install on this Ventura based machine - tedious of course.

Having said that though, a number of years ago I moved to Dropbox because I found it more reliable than other cloud storage providers. Recent experiences, particularly given I'm predominantly, but not exclusively, a Mac OS user are certainly causing me to re-think that now.

Cheers,

Trevor

This is an absolute travesty. I've just bought a new MacBook pro, and am only able to install a Ventura OS. I bought my whole system, and spent a year writing a grant to do it, just for the capability of dropbox archiving a fully indexed research archive.

I am an academic, and have 3.0 Terabytes of scholarship and academic articles and manuscripts indexed, physically on my harddrive on my old rig. This, naturally, needs to be kept on a partition drive, on my new rig, otherwise it's extremely unsafe. I have to be able to search my archive at my fingertips - cloud computing ain't going to cut it - you don't provide the speed or accuracy, and it's no good to me in the cloud when I'm an some archive somewhere trying to compare manuscripts.

@Megan the "We must keep aligned" response is just placebo talk - it does nothing. This is a critical issue. My entire research archive and setup has been based around Mac's superior indexing for the last 9 years. My career is on the line if I don't get my book out on time, and this has become a major obstacle. I've been paying for my dropbox subscription for years for this very setup, competing for grants to fund it and battling with local institutions to prevent them forcing me to one drive. This is not a "happy alignment" issue, this is a major, critical system change, and will cause a major system shift and departure from Dropbox.

I've tried to delete the dropbox folder in it's hidden pathname Root:/Users/~username~/Library/CloudStorage, but now Dropbox has broken and can't read the folder.

@Megan @Walter

I tried @treeandrew's excellent idea of copying the user directory over to my partition drive (I keep my 2nd drive internal to the machine - and yes, SSD only! Hence major investment for a 4T drive to sync locally and in cloud). Thank you, such an intelligent solution.

However, Ventura prevented me from copying the Home folder - all kinds of files were not given permission. I used both Finder and Terminal. The syntax for Terminal was: cp -r <Home Directory> <Target Destination>

Finder error was simply:

Terminal gives much more information about the copy failures, which are sometimes "Permission Denied" or "No Such File or Directory" or "unable to copy extended attributes" &c &c. But mainly "Permission Denied". The majority of these were in the "Library" directory.

Were I back in my PC days, at this point I would have ripped out the SSD, stuck it in a USB hub, and copied using another system. However, with macs that breaks warranty, and I haven't got time.
So I called Mac service support. I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with them, and got ***Amazing*** service, really they are great. Two techs walked through all of my trials, thought through multiple scenarios, we tried different ways to copy the Home folder, and to no avail. He's raising it to engineers to see if they can't allow the Cloud Services folder to exist on another drive.

The idea that everyone is migrating to cloud-based only data is WRONG. Not because of my personal feefees, but look at the market. HDs on portable computers are now huge. You can get an 8T SSD in the latest macs. If we're carrying around that much data, it's so insecure, it's obvs we need it backed up on the cloud. But not exclusively--otherwise, why 8T drive, and Dropbox indexing just can't cope (sorry but it's true - maybe for your emails or letters or whatever, but not for a research library). Dropbox is good for backup, and great for sharing, but it ain't up to indexing.

Apple will be getting back to me - unfortunately, not before I set off on 2 wk lecture tour where I need data with me, but I'll workaround. I hope you at Dropbox are also pounding Apple with this problem! For your loyal customers who rely on you!

Hi @Michael S.197,

Great news that Apple Support were helpful ... A little off topic, but I do remember the move of User Profile Home Directory quite a challenging process, but for my particular scenario worth doing, with a space constrained system drive, on a machine I really want to keep using for some time ...

I take your point about Apple's recent machines ... I've actually got a relatively recent MBP M1 Pro - with I'm afraid only 1 TB internal SSD - and also noted that the internal SSD options go to 8 TB now. The last time I looked, but perhaps that was a while ago they went to 4 TB, which would probably be sufficient for me.

Out of interest I put together a price for a 14" MBP, with the lowest-end M1 Max, 64 GB and 4 TB - I may as well upgrade the CPU if I were to changeover - and here is Australia - it comes in at $6,800. Not sure I can stretch to that just at the moment. The upgrade to 4 TB is $1,800 alone here in AU. So yes, I must admit having purchased "off the shelf" models mostly in the past, because you can often get them discounted, I suspect my next purchase will be a custom build with a much larger internal SSD to ensure I avoid all these space constraint issues.

Good luck with you Home Profile Move!
Cheers,
Trevor

@treeandrew how did you get your home folder to copy over? Did you do it in Ace Detective, or an earlier OS?

Hi @Michael S.197 ,

And with regard to the problems you're specifically experiencing, can I make some suggestions - but perhaps you've done this already? Not sure.

Create a NEW User on your machine - with Administrative privileges - if you haven't done so already
Log in as that user
Perform the copy of your old user's user profile directory as this new Administrative User - i.e. you're not copying while logged in as your primary user
Alternatively, re-start your Mac in "safe mode" - I think that's what it's called - and log in as that second user - and do the same thing. The bottom line is you're trying to ensure that your primary user doesn't have any of the files in your User Profile Home directory locked or in use.

Does that make sense? Hope that might help.

Hi @Michael S.197 ,

Did you see the link I put in the earlier part of this thread ... It's quite a good guide, even if it refers to an older version of the OS, however under Ventura some steps look somewhat different now ... However the basic steps should remain the same ... I should point out however that my move was actually done under Monterey - prior to upgrade under Ventura - but It wasn't causing any grief there either, so I think everything should work just fine. The key things I mentioned in my earlier post - that I think crossed over with your question about steps to take are still relevant:

Perform the copy while logged on as a 2nd Administrative level user - and KEEP that user as insurance in case anything really gets broken with your primary user
The setting up of the alternative settings for your User Profile Home Directory have changed location slightly in Ventura, but are pretty much the same as they were in earlier versions.
I should also say that some software - not much, but some - very poorly doesn't honour the redirection. For example, it will still try to look for files / documents at the "original" location of your profile such as <<system drive>>/users/documents/... or <<system drive>>/users/library/... and even some Apple applications, such as Photos and Music will need to be directed to the "relocated" Photos Library and iTunes Media Library, but it all works fine.
The side bar in finder is initially a bit clunky, but is easily repaired.

Hope that helps.

@treeandrew
Hi, Ventura definitely doesn't allow copying those folders. And the tech and I looked over your advice about secondary admin level, and he said it wouldn't work from there either - same restrictions would apply.

However, I finally did find a workaround here, proposed by the brilliant @Walter :
https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstall

Thank you so much Walter!!!!

One question, I was still not able to back up Documents, Downloads and Directory.

Is there a sudo workaround for these?