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I have an encrypted exFAT external drive, but I don't see the prompt to back it up to Dropbox.

I just bought a SanDisk 2TB drive and encrypted it with their software. There is currently only about 30GB of data on it. When I plug it in, I do not get the "Do you want to back up this drive" message, tried multiple times. The drive format is exFAT and it is attached to my PC. Any suggestions on how to get it backed up to Dropbox?

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Nancy

Hey @Lynk! Welcome to our Community.

If you right-click on your external drive directly (from your File Explorer's sidebar), do you see the “Backup to Dropbox…” option, by any chance? If you do, you can back it up to Dropbox this way, even if the dialog box doesn’t show up.

If this doesn’t work either, please try opening your Dropbox backup settings (by going to https://www.dropbox.com/backup/all, clicking on Manage backups > Open Backup settings in the top-right corner). Are you seeing your external drive there, along with the possibility to back it up?

Let me know how it goes.

Lynk

Nancy,

I tried these and the drive is not showing up either way. Anything else I can try before I give up and try another cloud?

Thank you!

vladgasan

Hi @Lynk ,

If you're setting up new Dropbox, you can you try the following steps:

Plug in the external drive and make sure it’s unlocked (since it's encrypted via SanDisk software).
Open the Dropbox desktop app but don’t complete sign-in yet.
On the “Welcome to Dropbox!” screen (shown in your screenshot), click:
1. Advanced Settings
2. Under Dropbox folder location, choose Other…
3. Navigate to and select a folder on the external drive where you'd like Dropbox to sync.
Complete sign-in and setup — Dropbox will now treat that external drive location as the main sync folder.

If you have an existing Dropbox folder on your computer you can move it to your external drive. This article explains how.

Let me know if this works!

Regards,
Vlad

(screenshot below is from Mac but the setup should look very similar on Windows)

Lynk

I will give this a try tonight. I have Dropbox installed on my laptop. I will install it on my external drive and see if I can make it work.

Thanks,

Audrey

Lynk

I read through the instructions and again at your response. I am simply trying to have Dropbox back up the files on my external drive. It has data on it which I want to have backed-up. I am not trying to move files to it. When I plug in flash drives I get a message asking me if I want to back-up the drive but I don't get that option with y SanDisk drive.

Any additional thoughts or things I could try?
Thanks,

Audrey

Lynk

I think I got it working. No idea how but it looks like it is backing up the drive. I'll get back to you if it did not work.

Thank you for your help and support.

Audrey

vladgasan

Great to hear you got it to work @Lynk! Let us know if you need help with anything else.