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Moving Dropbox folder from ~/Library/CloudStorage

What is the reason for not allowing me to specify where I want to save my Dropbox files in Ventura? I don't have enough space in my system drive to keep a copy of my Dropbox files. And yes, I need a local copy at all times. I tried replacing the folder with a symlink pointing to an external drive but that does not work. Dropbox just refuses to load and these are the last lines of the log file:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "dropbox/client/main.pyc", line 5055, in _setup_root_for_account
File "dropbox/sync_root/helpers.pyc", line 164, in create_root_for_account
File "dropbox/foundation/futures/basic.pyc", line 853, in result
File "dropbox/sync_root/handlers/macos/file_provider.pyc", line 121, in set_result_or_convert_exception
dropbox.mac.internal.MacError: [Errno 62] Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=62 "Too many levels of symbolic links"

It looks like 1 level of symbolic links is one level too many.

A search for Venture did not yield any results I found relevant. I need to know how to relocate the Dropbox folder. If I cannot relocate the folder, Dropbox loses its utility and that only means I will have to look for alternatives. I really hope I don't need to do that.

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elizeufreitas

Hello goodnight.

I'm using the Ventura version, and I also had the same problem, analyzing my Logs, and observing the Forum messages, I performed a battery of tests.

1. Reinstall via homebrew (same error)
2. Manual reinstall (same error)

Then I went to other levels of execution, when running as Root, it worked at first.
Puff, it dawned on me, permission was the problem.
I reset the permissions. (same error) lol 😞

I decided to run the binaries via terminal.
"cd /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/MacOS"
Then "./Dropbox"

However, I still got error.

Realizing that it had worked as root, and there were indications of permissions.
I decided to delete the root folders.
"/Users/elizeu/.dropbox"
"/Users/elizeu/Dropbox"

IT WORKED.!!!!

Running as RootRunning as a regular user, after excluding local folders.synchronizingHe follows:

All comments

Jay

Hi @mrforged, thanks for messaging the Community.

With the new version of the Dropbox desktop application for Mac OS, changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by the OS itself.

It will need to be stored on the CloudStorage folder, and can't be moved to another internal or external drive.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.

elizeufreitas

Hello goodnight.

I'm using the Ventura version, and I also had the same problem, analyzing my Logs, and observing the Forum messages, I performed a battery of tests.

1. Reinstall via homebrew (same error)
2. Manual reinstall (same error)

Then I went to other levels of execution, when running as Root, it worked at first.
Puff, it dawned on me, permission was the problem.
I reset the permissions. (same error) lol 😞

I decided to run the binaries via terminal.
"cd /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/MacOS"
Then "./Dropbox"

However, I still got error.

Realizing that it had worked as root, and there were indications of permissions.
I decided to delete the root folders.
"/Users/elizeu/.dropbox"
"/Users/elizeu/Dropbox"

IT WORKED.!!!!

Running as RootRunning as a regular user, after excluding local folders.synchronizingHe follows:

mrforged

I gave it a try but I am still getting the same error!

The only difference this time was that I was asked to grant Dropbox accessibility permissions.

Just to be clear, ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox is a symlink to some other location.

What did you reset permissions to? And where?

elizeufreitas

Hello, I advise you to define the Symbolic Link after the correct installation and startup of Dropbox.

I also had the same issue and message from accessibility permissions.

As I said, to reset the permissions, I had to delete the folders:

/Users/yourusername/.dropbox
/Users/yourusername/Dropbox

Take this test and answer here.

mrforged

Got it to work!

elizeufreitas

Very good, so we can consider this case as solved.

FGK-120

@Jay wrote:

With the new version of the Dropbox desktop application for Mac OS, changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by the OS itself.

It will need to be stored on the CloudStorage folder, and can't be moved to another internal or external drive.

What is the Dropbox company's advice to users whose Dropbox folder on an external drive is too large to be accommodated on the internal startup drive? (And who don't want to jump through hoops with Terminal workarounds.)

Are you saying that any files in excess of startup drive capacity will become online-only with just a link in the user's Dropbox folder?

Thanks.

mrforged

That is what they are saying and they are blaming Apple for it.

From what I have been able to find, the requirement for the cloud storage provider's local copy to be stored on the local system drive is due to a dependency of a macOS feature or API called fileproviderd. This fileproviderd is a macOS-native method for accessing cloud file systems and it is what Apple's own iCloud drive uses. Apparently, Apple removed certain functionality from macOS that Dropbox and Microsoft's software (I am sure others as well) depended on to force them to use fileproviderd and it all began back in Catalina.

I know from first hand experience that the requirement to store Dropbox under ~/Library/CloudStorage/ can be worked around. Nothing is going to break. If I can do it with just a couple of commands from the Terminal, you can bet Dropbox could do that for you too if they really wanted to. Why don't they? The world may never know. At the very least, you know the requirement is a joke because if OneDrive can use any location on the local system drive to store its files, so can Dropbox. Why don't they? Another one of the big mysteries of life.

I only wish they didn't say things like "changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported by the OS itself." That is an outright lie and does not look good on you, Dropbox.

Plumspot

This must be Apple's way of moving everyone away from Dropbox to iCloud. I don't have 2TB of internal storage. But it looks like Google Drive uses some kind of alias to have the drive folder located on an external drive. ??? I love Dropbox, but I may have to move to Google Drive. 😛

monicame

Can you give step by step instructions for those of us who are not experts. Thanks! I understand the concept but have no idea how to enact it.

elizeufreitas

Hello.

I can help yes.1. Access Finder (File Explorer).
2. Press the following keys (CMD + Shift + G) "Go to folder"
3. In the next pop-up type /Users/~ and access your user's folder.
4. While in your user's folder, press the following keys (CMD + Shift + . ) "At the end, the dot key" will show the hidden folders.
5. Select the .dropbox and Dropbox folders, delete with the following keys (CMD + Alt + Delete).
6. Reinstall Dropbox. 😄

Follow print's for better understanding.

Note: The Dropbox folder is just a shortcut to "/Users/elizeu/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox"

Caminho absoluto das pastas de configuraçãoReal caminho da pasta Dropbox

Plumspot

Thank you for your insight and help. But that's what I was trying to avoid was the reinstall — as it takes days to resync up. Might as well move to Google Drive. Take it easy.

mrforged

You will not need to re-synchronize your files.

Let's assume you have your huge Dropbox folder stored on an external drive and it is accessible at /Volumes/External/Dropbox. You can replace that location with the actual location of your folder for the remainder of these instructions. It will work just fine.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

I assume your Dropbox folder is located on an external drive that can be accessed at /Volumes/External/Dropbox. You should substitute that folder with the actual location of your Dropbox folder as you go through this guide.

If you have not already done so, make sure you quit Dropbox before you begin!

Open a Terminal window
In the Terminal, type

sudo rm ~/Library/Dropbox && ~/Library/.dropbox

Enter your Mac's password when prompted. You will not get any visual feedback while you are entering the password
Run Dropbox. It will think it's the first time you run it. Go through the setup.
As the last step of the setup, you will be asked to choose what files and folders in your Dropbox account you want to keep a local copy of. Select them all. Complete the setup.
As soon as Dropbox loads, quit the app.
Now go back to the Terminal:

sudo rm ~/Library/Dropbox && ln -s  /Volumes/External/Dropbox ~/Library/Dropbox

To verify everything is good:

ls -al ~/Library/Dropbox

You should see a listing of all the files located at /Volumes/External/Dropbox If you don't, go back to step 2.
OPTIONAL: Install macFuse https://osxfuse.github.io/
Now start Dropbox. You are DONE!

rng2023

This does not work in the least.

rng2023

This doesn't really seem like precise step by step instructions ... I am on Ventura 13.2 and I don't have a users/dropbox folder. It's already in the cloud storage location. It's a brand new mini m2. Your instructions just talk about deleting and reinstalling Dropbox (which will yield the exact same results). Mind being a more precise for others who are struggling to move their Dropbox location?

Graham

Hi @elizeufreitas,

I hope you are well today. I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you for your contribution to this thread! I can see that you have put a lot of thought into finding this solution and even more thought and time into helping other Community members use it. We really appreciate your time and effort.

Thanks again, and have a great weekend!

Graham

B R Y N L S

I'm on Mac 13.2.1. I just got the notice to update my Dropbox, and it's now in the CloudStorage location. However, it was a little wonky. I have all my files saved locally, and in the cloud. But it set some to online only, etc... Also, I use Dropbox for my Apple Music library, and it was stuck on "syncing" as it doesn't like the "Automatically Add to Music" folder, so I had to set that one to ignore, and now no issues.

So what I did was I have a backup externally, and I made a backup of my Dropbox folder, and put that on the desktop (I don't sync the desktop). I then delete all the files in my Dropbox, and then made sure everything was up to date, then I added my folders back one by one. But since I deleted them on Dropbox, but didn't delete them permanently, the process didn't seem to have to re-upload the files, it just pulled them in from Dropbox, etc. I have about 100 GB, so the entire process took about an hour, from the time I had to figure out what was going on, etc.

But now my Dropbox is fine. The only thing is that by default now, Camera Uploads is online only, and if you make it available offline, it adds a green check. None of my other folders now have green checks by default, if I created them offline. And anything I drop in them from my Mac, they are available online, which I how I use Dropbox. I don't add files from other locations. So with Camera Uploads. I either have to manually download those, or set the folder to offline, but then deal with a single green check....

Whatevs, it could have been worse.. and I blame Apple for all this.. I should be able to have my Dropbox folder wherever I want it... but oh well.

jreades

I can't speak to the issue of moving Dropbox to an external device, but I have just dealt with the failure to sync issue and wanted to clarify a couple of things because it seems to me like the problem is tied to the way Dropbox tries to migrate you from the old setup to the new one. I've had to resend about 13GB of files and folders as a result.

I reset the app as follows from the Terminal:

osascript -e 'tell application "Dropbox" to quit'
rm ~/Dropbox
mv ~/.dropbox ~/dropbox.dot.bak
open -a "Dropbox"

The first line tells Dropbox to quit. You should find that ~/Dropbox (or ~/Documents/Dropbox) is a simple file that can be removed with rm. If you get an error then this means that it is a folder and you should not delete it but, rather, rename it (e.g. mv ~/Dropbox ~/Dropbox.bak). ~/.dropbox is a hidden folder containing various info about your account so (again) my preference is to move it, not delete it, until you know that everything is working.

After that, I opened Dropbox and it prompted me to authenticate and acted like I had never set it up on this machine before. So that seems to have resolved the issue as far as I can tell. Now I am just sitting through a massive resynching of my data.

labswift

Hi what's the command so that I can skip the /library/cloudstorage way of filing. I'm a DJ, and have all my files saved in the original dropbox location. Now when I add the same music from the same folder it comes out as a duplicate with the file location changed. It's really screwing up my way of organizing my music

Screen Shot 2023-03-03 at 6.41.37 PM.png

Jeff6

This so sucks! Does this change gives users more convenience or brings more trouble? For sure, it's the latter. I know it's MacOS's policy. This shows Apple is now away from what users really need and away from the spirit of Jobs.

rng2023

It may be convenient in the sense that it's probably a bit faster for transferring files than it would be to an external but it's IMO it's massively more inconvenient for a number of reasons, such as smaller disk space and not being able to take the files with you on an external. I used to be able to use Dropbox on an external, have everything synced to that, and then I could plug it into my laptop which also looked for Dropbox on the external and everything would be in SYNC because the once true source is the external drive. I can't do that now. The only way to really do that would be if I used something like CCC (carbon copy cloner) to make daily sync backups to an external to keep the Dropbox folder and external drive in sync.

iainthorp

This worked for me after months of nothing working. Thank you so much!

DenisInternet

Hello,

I use TrueNAS to work with my data locally (fiber network for color grading). Occasionally I use dropbox to share project files/media/assets with clients. With the. latest version of MacOS it seems now I can't change the storage path, and also dropbox doesn't support the ZFS file system.

Anyone have a workaround for this? If I can't use these two features, I might as well just use something else like WeTransfer or Nextcloud. Any pointers/work arounds/alternatives are really appreciated. Payed 200 bucks earlier this year, and it was running fine on an old Mac system.

Calvin2DBX

Hi @DenisInternet,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community!

I moved your post to this thread as you have a similar question about changing the storage path.

Keep me posted on what you find!

mkaufman

This happened a year ago. Why wouldn't Dropbox email its users to tell them this news? I found out by noticing recently that my main internal drive had 3g of 500 gigs left because Dropbox had reinstalled itself on the local drive and I had two versions running for months. Now I've paid for something useless because the main reason I use it is to free up a small 500 gig drive for application files. Now it's useless and I won't renew after being among your first customers from the beta around 2006/7. Now DB is spending money on F1 sponsorships??? WTF happened to the company??? This is nuts.

Mark

They did inform people - there were lots and lots of emails and popups on the web page about it with directions to read FAQ's about the upcoming changes: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes