Backup EVERYTHING to external hard drive on Mac

Question

I have a professional account with about 2TB of data that includes folders on my iMac and online-only folders as well.  I want to backup ALL of this information to an external hard drive and need some help/advice please.  Clearly, DB does not include a feature to do this (which is completely unsatisfactory).   Additionally, now that Apple has restricted the location of my Dropbox folder, I cannot use an external drive as the primary location which would enable me to have a copy of everything locally.

Who has solved this problem and would you kindly share your solution.  I do not want to leave Dropbox after nearly ten years but this is a deal-breaker for me.

Thanks!

dd_nvidia · Answer

it's not possible using Apple's APIs on the newer OS to do this without doing it on a bodged kind of way.

Personally, i was thinking of maybe setting up a VM in MacOS and having dropbox run in the VM on either an older MacOS version or some other OS with a version of dropbox that does support sync, have the external drive shared as a "network drive" somehow maybe that could maybe allow native usb interface with my main host machine running MacOS 13 as well as the VM - that way the VM does the syncing and the file structure sits as is on the drive for the host system to read/edit.

This would be a terrible idea for battery life and especially optimising performance - but VMs are quick to suspend and start again so yeah, that's the idea i've got to fix atm until Dropbox maybe come up with something more elegant

BDGeorgia · Answer

Thanks for the feedback Jay.  So DROPBOX, why don't you fix this situation for your clients?  I cannot be the only one who wants and needs this type of feature/capability.  Thanks!

Jay · Answer

Hi @BDGeorgia, thanks for messaging the Community.

Aside from manually downloading files and folders from the site directly onto the external drive, there isn't another method to do so on a Mac device.

I'll leave this thread open for other users to post their suggestions.