15 ms·

Expected changes with Dropbox for macOS

180 points by jez 4y ago

nvr219 4y ago
ugh why
- pancrufty 4y ago
  It’s not 2007 anymore and Dropbox isn’t a plain “rsync GUI” anymore. It’s been obvious for years now that they don’t care about technical users so we should not use it anymore. I probably moved on in 2017.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Agreed. I use Syncthing[1] and it's great. It just sits in the background and works like Dropbox used to. If you have a NAS or some other always-on machine it acts as a good master for syncing things. [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
    - eropple 4y ago
      I haven't looked at Syncthing in a few years. What's the best way to get files on an iOS device, without syncing them all to the device? (I use this a lot in Dropbox to grab a picture or something and use the OS share functionality to send it to Slack or whatever.)
  - thevagrant 4y ago
    Why though? Surely there is a reason they changed their sync process.
pancrufty 4y ago
They’re moving to a modern API. Where the files are stored makes little difference to the user. The only problem I see is that they’re dropping support for files stored on external drives: that should have been the title.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > Where the files are stored makes little difference to the user. I beg to differ. A common use case for dropbox is to sync files used by other programs, and you can't always change the storage location that they use. This breaks that use case. I don't really understand why Apple have done this. Seems like a big regression in functionality to me.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    If I remember right, the Dropbox folder is originally ~/Dropbox anyway, right? You can't just sync arbitrary stuff in your home folder using it without getting into symlinks in the first place.
    - pancrufty 4y ago
      That’s right. I think people forget now Dropbox works. It mentions this in the linked document, it explicitly says you have to recreate the links. But no, downvote the people who know how to read instead.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      For a less technically-savvy user there's a big difference between "my spreadsheet is in the Dropbox folder" vs. "my spreadsheet is in Library/CloudStorage". Especially when the "~/Library" folder is hidden by default.
      - nicoburns 4y ago
        In fairness, I think these new "file providers" show up the Finder sidebar by default.
      - pancrufty 4y ago
        Less technically-savvy people don’t know what you’re talking about. It still looks like a folder in the sidebar.
    - kccqzy 4y ago
ec109685 4y ago
Pretty lame that Apple blocked syncing of iPhotos libraries.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Yeah, that jumped out to me too. I wonder what their justification is? Seems like another anti-competitive restriction.
  - simondotau 4y ago
    I imagine there’s a possible justification of libraries getting broken because Photos.app doesn’t know how to handle partial syncs gracefully. Many apps don’t. (Though I also agree Apple really does need to clean up its own room before worrying about what third party software is doing.)
    - huggingmouth 4y ago
      Wait. I thought partial syncs are never visible to the rest of the system. Files are either synced or they're not. AFAIK, synching does it this way.
      - zbentley 4y ago
        Doing an atomic-swap sync of a folder (which is what a photo library is) can result in momentary doubling of size-on-disk. For something as big as a photo library that may not be acceptable/possible. The solution (differential syncs with atomic update and with support for the version being diffed against changing during the sync) are quite tricky to get working reliability, and they get less reliable the larger the atomic unit of data is. All that is also assuming that there's a way for the sync program to interpret what units (files or folders) the user wants to be updated slowly/expensively/atomically, which is itself very hard to solve without adding friction or foot guns.
        kccqzy 4y ago
jongala 4y ago
IMO the other really big deal here is that ~/Library is a hidden folder by default. For most users Dropbox will only be exposed under the "Locations" section in finder sidebars. That feels like a huge regression to me — the whole idea of Dropbox was "a folder, that syncs." An invisible folder that syncs is much worse!
- pancrufty 4y ago
  Clearly it’s not invisible. While you can’t target it by typing ~/Dropbox, people using the Finder won’t notice a difference.
  - knaik94 4y ago
    If a user can't open or target a folder by typing in the location, it's useless for any meaningful file management. This feels like macOS is becoming more like iOS instead of the other way around. There is a setting to re-enable it, but it shouldn't need a setting.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      Finder -> Go -> Go to Folder .. And being able to open a file by its path is not a requirement for meaningful file management. It's something only power users would do and for them the Terminal is always going to be a far better choice.
      - knaik94 4y ago
        That's a very low bar to set for "power user". By that standard even users wanting to install Dropbox and managing files themselves would be enough to count as a "power user". Recommending the use of a terminal is even more of a regression. It's not a far better choice, it's not even a good choice for file management. Basically everything is slower through a terminal interface.
        arthurcolle 4y ago
chadlavi 4y ago
Ok what the fuck. This breaks a ton of stuff for me. You can't put it anywhere else??? Edit: for the first time in a decade I'm considering Dropbox alternatives. This is a lot of different ways for a product to suddenly get crappier.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Dropbox gets skeevier and skeevier every time I install it. It used to be a snap to install and get working, now it's more about their business needs than mine. There is (still) room for competition in this space.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    If it is true that Apple is forcing their hand here, then whatever competition you find isn't going to be much better, unfortunately.
    - baby 4y ago
      Usually if you use apple devices you have to use apple apps. They tend to slowly kill the competition by improving things for themselves. So I would say iCloud is the way to go here.
      - alpaca128 4y ago
        What do you mean? I've got two Macs without iCloud account and aside from Finder & Mail I use almost zero Apple applications. Seems to work quite well including two Nextcloud accounts (aside from general system instability), though I've not been on Mac OS for long yet.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        smoldesu 4y ago
        Apple has a bit of a history removing software features from the Mac. Nvidia driver support, 32-bit application support, OpenGL support and GNU support has all been dropped by Apple over the years. The longer I owned my Mac, the less capable it became.
CodeWriter23 4y ago
ln -s ~/Dropbox ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox (Unless I’ve reversed link_name and target)
- jtokoph 4y ago
  You have reversed it. I used to reverse it all the time until I came up with a simple way to remember it. Just think of the mv or cp command, the first argument is always the original thing that exists already. It's the same with ln. The first argument is the existing path you want to make a link to.
  - meling 4y ago
    Yes, and you don’t even need to pass the destination name if it is the same as the source (if your current directory is ~/ of course…) ln -s ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox
    - jdshaffer 4y ago
      Should a symlink also work to solve the "Dropbox on an external drive" issue that this change will create? (I suspect it will as a folder is a folder as far as the OS is concerned, but I haven't tinkered much with symlinks).
      - meling 4y ago
        I don’t think so, unless you are able to create a symlink from the Library/CloudStorage folder to an external drive. I suspect there are some limitations related to this. But I haven’t tried this specific case. But on advice from Dropbox support I did try to symlink from Dropbox to ‘Dropbox (UniName)’ to avoid the space and parentheses in the folder name. This seemingly worked, but after weeks of syncing problems I capitulated and instead link in the other direction… (this isn’t solving the problem of space in the folder name that some software doesn’t like, but syncing now works at least)
        4y ago
mattl 4y ago
Maestral is a great app for Dropbox on Mac OS X. Highly recommended.
gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 4y ago
Man.. I really miss Steve. He never would have let this bastardization of the desktop machine operating system happen. The only thing consistent with every new macOS release at this point is the removal of more features I heavily relied on and the addition of ever more iOS transplants that make zero sense in the context of a desktop computer.
- azinman2 4y ago
  What was removed?
- etchalon 4y ago
  Steve would 100% of done this. Steve didn't care about vendors.
  - baby 4y ago
    Tbf he was willing to break things and not provide backward compatibility forever, which I think is great if you want to keep innovating and keep improving things at your layer. It works as long as the layers above keep adapting, which so far they have done
- michelb 4y ago
  Steve hated Dropbox, he would have tried to kill it.
brundolf 4y ago
What alternatives do people like these days for "just sync/backup a folder"? I would really like to avoid self-managing something if I can
- dlyons 4y ago
  Syncthing. It's amazing. I use it across my NixOS workstation, M1 Macbook, home lab server (acting as an "always on" folder to always fetch syncs), and my Steam Deck. If you use Nix it's really easy to setup: https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/nixos/default.nix#L100 https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/nixos/...
  - brundolf 4y ago
    > I would really like to avoid self-managing something if I can :) Unless there's some managed syncthing service I don't know about. I want to learn Nix for this even less than I want to manage it by hand on a VPS
    - dlyons 4y ago
      You don't host it. It just talks to each of your machines peer-to-peer. Just run it on each machine and it works like magic.
      - brundolf 4y ago
        I would like something on the cloud in case of physical disaster. That's the main reason I use Dropbox, to be honest
        dlyons 4y ago
        It keeps multiple copies of your data on whatever machine is running syncthing. So if you lose data on one machine, it's still safe on another. Sure if all machines go at once, you're screwed. But I'm not too worried about that, personally. If you have something you absolutely can't lose just stick it in a Backblaze bucket and use syncthing for the rest. Backblaze is cheap and has both an API and web interface.
morpheuskafka 4y ago
Similar changes (including the same local path change) made by other cloud providers: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/12178485 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/12178485 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/inside-the-new-files-on-demand-experience-on-macos/ba-p/3058922 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-bl... https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/01/onedrive-mac-users-unhappy-files-on-demand/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/01/onedrive-mac-users-unha...
shortformblog 4y ago
Wow, this is terrible. As a critic of their slowness, I can now see why they dragged their feet on Apple Silicon for so long—the File Provider API really just trashes the experience. In a world where Apple no longer allows for internal storage upgrades, the fact that you can only store your Dropbox on your main drive is just such a joke. This is the degradation of the experience by a thousand API changes. I moved to SyncThing/local syncing in response to Dropbox’s moves last year, and I gotta say I am not regretting it one bit.
- starwatch 4y ago
  The one thing that's kept me from SyncThing is the lack of iOS integration [1]. But the changes Apple has forced on Dropbox here is making me reconsider. [1]: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102 https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102
  - vladharbuz 4y ago
    Möbius Sync works well on iOS, I use it regularly.
    - shortformblog 4y ago
      This is what I use.
  - zuhsetaqi 4y ago
    How has Apple forced them to do those changes? Apples APIs only allows it that way but Dropbox don’t have to use those APIs. There‘re other Cloud Sync clients that just work fine supporting all those features without using Apples APIs. So Dropbox decided to switch to using Apples APIs knowing that it‘ll lack those features.
  - ghusto 4y ago
    I switched from Syncthing, to Sync.com, and now finally to a combination of pCloud for archiving, and Syncthing for everyday files. I'm happy with this set up, and recommend it. EDIT: My motivation was wanting reliable end-to-end encryption. The lack of iOS support isn't an issue for me either, since one of the reasons I avoided iPhones was precisely because I knew things like this would at some point be a blocker. 99% of the time, iPhones are fine, but that 1% of issues that Apple policy causes is dealbreakingly bad.
iansinnott 4y ago
Worth mention the open source project Maestral: https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral (an unofficial Dropbox client)
- Groxx 4y ago
  It has a horrifically long initial sync for me (hours of silence and no apparent activity), but yep. I do not miss the official client in the slightest after switching - it has been significantly faster and better-behaved in every imaginable way. In particular, I no longer have to stare at Dropbox and wonder why it hasn't uploaded my tiny plain text file change for several hours. Which I've had to do regularly for the past couple years. Maestral consistently uploads within seconds.
- aryehof 4y ago
  Gets an upvote for me. Maestral has been efficiently syncing my Mac for at least 2 years now, through the whole no available M1 arm client and other Dropbox turmoil.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I've been using it since shortly before the M1 Max came out and I quite prefer it. No nonsense and it makes Dropbox function like I want it to (just a folder that syncs). I wish it has some better activity reporting (when I'm waiting on a large file to sync that I want to share I'm in the dark) but for fire-and-forget storage it's great.
mnalex 4y ago
OneDrive did the same thing.
krono 4y ago
Rclone is a FOSS alternative interface (CLI) to many cloud storage providers and provides some neat extra functionality. It has been working very well for me with OneDrive and S3, but of course use at your own risk. https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
- blipmusic 4y ago
  Using it with Dropbox and target my code-in-progress for manual "selective" sync. The filter list is nice to avoid syncing compilation artifacts.
shortcake27 4y ago
FFS. I haven't enjoyed Dropbox since they disallowed symlinks. For many years I kept my home directory stock and created symlinks within Dropbox for Music, Pictures, and Documents etc. Then for some reason they actively prevented symlinks, so I swapped it around and moved the directories into Dropbox and symlinked from my home directory. This broke icons in Finder sidebar with no way to fix. It also breaks navigation in Finder, eg go into ~/Pictures and go back up and you're in ~/Dropbox, not home. I hate it. Now, the path is going to get even worse and my real directory for Pictures will be something like "~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/Pictures" instead of "~/Pictures". I was excited when they announced Dropbox backup, I gave it a shot and it just did the exact same thing - it moved the real directories into an obscure location within ~/Dropbox and created symlinks in the home directory . It is genuinely amazing how Dropbox worked better for me 10 years ago than it does today. But I've been scared to move off Dropbox because of how reliable it is. I tried Google Drive a while ago and it was extremely buggy, all my files got duplicated, and I had no trust in the service. Wouldn't go with Google for other reasons these days. I was considering Sync last year, think I'm going to bite the bullet and give it a go.
- jamesgeck0 4y ago
  All cloud file sync services on macOS are ultimately going to have similar issues unless Apple dramatically improves the API they're forcing everyone to use.
  - shortcake27 4y ago
    Yeah good point, I just read the other comments where many other cloud sync services have regressed too.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - Groxx 4y ago
    As a user of both a recent OSX and an M1, and using multiple other syncing services: nah. Others are doing just fine. Dropbox is likely being pig-headed about something, forcing them into this awful corner, and they're loudly blaming Apple for it (partially justifiably, partially "if it hurts when you do that, don't do that"). My guess is it's the transparently download when accessed files, due to losing a lot of kext abilities through the years. Apple hasn't blocked applications from changing files or using file notification events, so "normal" syncing things are still running just fine.
newscracker 4y ago
The only reason I’ve remained on the Dropbox free plan for a decade is because in the early years I was able to boost the free space to 25GB through referrals and contests. I use it as a quick way to sync files and access them from mobile devices (I have separate online backups not dependent on this). I’m not interested in buying yet another cloud storage plan from the major providers just for this. From this article, it seems like support for macOS Big Sur (and prior releases) will be dropped in the coming months. That plus the dropping of LAN Sync, which was great when it worked, means I’d have to consider dropping Dropbox. I’ve tried Maestral (https://maestral.app/ https://maestral.app/) once last year and it made a mess of the files while the official Dropbox client was being used by another user (not at the same time). So I switched back to the official client. If there are good clients that would continue to work (don’t know what the Dropbox server side changes are), I could continue using it.
jez 4y ago
A lot of people are taking this as yet another example of Dropbox changing things for no reason, but I think it’s important to make clear that in this case Apple is forcing their hand. Dropbox is being told by Apple that apps must integrate with File Provider API[1] if they want to present files that don't exist on disk until they’re first opened. This API is hamstrung and limiting, full of instabilities and quirks (designed to fit iCloud primarily but not necessarily everyone else). In my opinion, the fault lies with Apple here. [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider (Full disclosure: I interned at Dropbox for 3 months 8 years ago.)
- flangola7 4y ago
  I don't see how Apple can force the matter. Why would Dropbox comply if it breaks things?
  - Twisell 4y ago
    They can't force but they can't retract from the AppStore. You'd still be able to deliver outside the AppStore with a signed App on MacOS but with way less visibility.
    - jshier 4y ago
      Who's discovering DropBox from the App Store? Seems like they could drop that and be just fine. Much smaller devs have.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      Who installs anything to a desktop computer from an app store instead of the developer's website?
      - msingh_5 4y ago
        I prefer installing things from App Store on my parents' computers cause it will handle automatic updates and provides certain guarantees (i.e. can rely on Apple not letting malware onto their App Store).
nosefrog 4y ago
When I was at Dropbox, one of the big threats to the business we talked about was OS's banning file sync applications and forcing them to use their own APIs for them instead. It looks like that's finally happening now, unfortunately.
- baby 4y ago
  It’s interesting how Apple is making so many enemies in tech. When I was at Facebook it was the same, with mark encouraging people to get android phones. I see that amazon, twitter, and the gaming industry all have issues with apple too. It’s interesting to say the least. I just cancelled my twitter blue membership when I learned that I was going to pay more just because I subscribed through iOS, thinking I will resub from dekstop, but then never did. I also ended up buying a bunch of audiobooks and books through apple books because I never could do it through kindle and the amazon apps. I can’t imagine I’m the only one.
- wtallis 4y ago
  It doesn't look like that's what's happening. This is only an issue because Dropbox isn't trying to be a file sync application any more, and is instead trying to be a userspace network filesystem driver.
  - moonlighter 4y ago
    Exactly that! Compare the simplicity from the original Dropbox app to the behemoth of what it is now...
    - wtallis 4y ago
      The original Dropbox wasn't just simple to use, it was also simple to understand: you knew what it was doing and how it worked, well enough to have correct expectations about how it would behave in circumstances like having a slow or broken internet connection. I guess they now consider those circumstances to be so exceptionally rare that they can be ignored.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
codazoda 4y ago
My first response was rage but on more careful reading, this doesn’t change much for me. I can probably symlink ~/Dropbox to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox and call it a day. Here’s why it doesn’t affect me much, which I mostly wrote to calm my own nerves… - I have a bunch of scripts, aliases, crons, and other console things that rely on ~/Dropbox. A symlink should fix that and it looks like Dropbox will create one automatically when it moves the folder. - I can create a new favorite to the new folder in Finder. I use a single subdirectory (my name) so, if I can only do this with a subdirectory, not the Dropbox root, that’s fine. I presume I can do it with root too though. - I don’t store Dropbox files on an external drive. Seems like I could never get this to work right. I just use my internal. I guess I got lucky here. - I don’t use many of Apples Proprietary tools that use flattened package files. I onky use Photo’s temporarily, and I don’t really use Pages, Numbers, or Keys. But, if I did, they only really work on Mac, so this seems like a sane change to me. I mostly use similar cross platform apps like Libre Office if I want it to be portable. - I don’t search in Finder, I just use spotlight, which continues to work the same way. - I might have 300k files, I’m not sure. I try to organize photos into folder annually to cut down the number. Lots of things have trouble with this many files. I already try to organize around similar limitations. - I’m already on MacOS 13. MacOS 12 seems to have a handful of file issues that probably wouldn’t affect me anyways, but definitely won’t under 13. - I don’t use LAN syncing. - I keep almost all of my files in offline mode (on the local machine, taking up space, duplicates, etc).
- eslaught 4y ago
  > Files added to your Dropbox account from another device or that are shared by another user will default to online-only. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this completely breaks the sync model if you use more than one computer. It used to be you could add a file on machine A, and without any user interaction, it would sync to machine B. Now that's broken unless I go and manually mark every top-level folder as offline. And don't ever add anything to the root of your Dropbox folder....
  - codazoda 4y ago
    Could be true. In an act of luck, I created a folder for myself and that’s all I sync. So, if I can set this at the folder level, I just set that one folder to offline and I’m good. It’s just happen-stance that I set mine up this way years ago though.
perryizgr8 4y ago
I don't understand why Dropbox has to do all this. Can't they just manage all files by themselves? Just open and close files like any program. No need to use whatever new bs API apple is pushing. This is macos, not iOS. You can still run any turing complete software. Or am I mistaken with that assumption?
- wtallis 4y ago
  It seems like Dropbox of today is trying to be a completely different tool than what Dropbox originally was. Their goal is no longer to sync files that reside on a folder on your machines, but instead to store files primarily in the cloud and present the illusion that they reside on your machine. Apparently the Apple API for doing the latter comes with restrictions that make it more obvious that Dropbox has abandoned its original purpose. Personally, I like the idea of forcing files that don't really exist on my machine to be presented through a different UI and namespace than files that are actually locally available. A complicated overlay mount of a network filesystem and a local caching layer is not something that should be shoehorned into an unsuspecting user's home directory. It's trying to present an abstraction that has too many pitfalls.
- systoll 4y ago
  Prior to 2016, the dropbox app managed which files were synced with your filesystem, and you could always go into the Dropbox app to see the files that weren't synced. As of 2016, dropbox started to intercept calls to open/move/delete files at the kernel level – https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/going-deeper-with-project-infinite https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/going-deeper-with-projec... – this allowed them to create proxies for all the files that weren’t synced, and to then download them whenever something tried to open them. The API they used for that was always intended for Antivirus and similar programs, but it worked. Apple replaced that API with a new one which is a lot more narrowly targeted to Antivirus, and dropbox couldn’t use it. Dropbox could try and do things without any API, but they’d get themselves kicked off the App Store, they’d need to convince users to turn off 'System Integrity Protection' which would try to keep the OS kernel unmodified, and their implementation would be prone to breaking at any time. Just managing the files by themselves would essentially be going back to the pre-2016 approach, and the file provider API is better than that.
0x17051D37 4y ago
I dropped DropBox years ago, and rely only on LucidLink(www.lucidlink.com)
donatj 4y ago
> Existing packages will be updated to the new format the next time they are changed and synced. > Flattened packages can only be accessed on devices running Dropbox for macOS. Does this mean they are altering my existing Numbers and Keynote bundles in a way that makes them only accessible in macOS? That's problematic
- kccqzy 4y ago
  I believe Numbers and Keynote stopped using bundles (aka packages) since iWork ’09.
miga 4y ago
"In order to integrate application with the operating system, we will downgrade the following features and worsen user experience: ..."
photoGrant 4y ago
The lack of local sync on LAN has severely crippled our teams on-site in limited wifi scenarios. We've been moving our solutions away from Dropbox.
meling 4y ago
I’m sooo annoyed with our Dropbox for education account, insisting to name the folder as ‘Dropbox (UniName)’? (I think this also applies to enterprise accounts…) This is a Dropbox problem as my org can only influence the name inside the parentheses. There are two bad things with this folder naming… the parentheses and the space. I still use software the does not work well with spaces and parentheses in folder names. There is an open issue about this with 100s of complaints, and Dropbox just ignores the problem. PS: symlinking doesn’t always solve the problem. And this new scheme to put it in Library/CloudStorage will make path names even longer… (sometimes my terminal prompt resolves the full path instead of the symlink; never took the time to figure out why) Anyone that have solutions to these issues, I would love to hear about it.
- baby 4y ago
  > space. I still use software the does not work well with spaces and parentheses in folder names It sounds like that should be fixed instead no?
  - meling 4y ago
    Sure. But it is sometimes hard to debug… (even to identify this as the culprit). For example, for a while one of the vscode plugins that I use just stopped working and it took quite a while for me to figure out why it had stopped working. There were no errors reported in the log. Only once I suspected what the problem was, did I move my project out of Dropbox to a local folder without space to confirm my suspicions. But the fact that several 100s of other people experienced similar or worse problems made this naming scheme a bad choice imo. A simple Dropbox-UniName would’ve avoided the problem for lots of people… That said, I don’t even see the reason to force a specific naming scheme for people’s local Dropbox folder. They should allow me to name the folder X or D on my drive. But maybe it’s just me that don’t like long path names…
RagnarD 4y ago
I dropped Dropbox years ago when it had the gall to assert that MP3s that I'd ripped from my own CDs were "pirated". I won't use a system that snoops on the files I store with it. I suggest looking at Sync.com as an alternative. They don't hold the master encryption password for your files.
- sneak 4y ago
  Syncthing makes paying for dropbox obsolete.
- baby 4y ago
  Wait what? I’ve always stored my whole MP3 collections there, since the early days of dropbox, and never heard of that
- cal85 4y ago
  Are you sure you are remembering right? Dropbox scans your files for copyright infringement? Has anyone else encountered this?
  - kilroy123 4y ago
    Yes. They nuked my account and I lost over a decade's worth of data in a moment.
  - alpaca128 4y ago
    Most cloud services do it. Microsoft has been scanning all uploaded pictures for their visual contents for years, Google had this famous case last year where they reported a Drive user for an uploaded picture. It's E2E encrypted or they have full access and make use of it, simple as that.
jbverschoor 4y ago
Guess it makes sense now to look for something else and use Dropbox for the occasional sharing of files between people
moonlighter 4y ago
This was the final straw which prompted me to move off Dropbox. Initially, dropbox was wonderful, super simple and did ONE thing amazingly well. Then... the thing morphed into a monster with all sorts of "corporate america" features which I never cared for. Fine, they need to make money, I get it. Besides storing and syncing files, the dropbox app on iOS was amazing to take quick scans of receipts on the phone and sync them to the Mac and auto-process them there (via the receipts.app; great 3rd party app). Anyway, in 2023, iCloud Drive with the native Files.app on iOS does the same thing for me. Just as good, just as reliable. For free, without the bulky corporate app stuff.
- Joeri 4y ago
  But … icloud benefits from being part of the OS. Dropbox is probably technically unable to build a service that works as smoothly as icloud. It seems unfair to ding dropbox for that situation. Having said that, I use icloud as well, together with syncthing.
jwr 4y ago
I'm slightly confused. I read through the entire list carefully, and there are multiple downsides for the changes. The only potential benefit is that files can "pretend" to be there, and be automatically fetched over the network when needed, which is something that I would consider a downside, as I'd much rather have a full copy of my entire tree locally, so that I'm certain it's there when I'm offline. So why do it at all? Why not drop the feature of "pretend you're there" and just continue like before? The downsides seem massive to me. Also, is there something that prevents me from just running Maestral and having access to my dropbox stuff just like before? These days most of my important stuff gets synchronized using syncthing. It's much more performant, became extremely reliable over the years, doesn't hog my CPU like crazy, and doesn't show upsell banners and prompts. I would have dropped Dropbox a long time ago if it wasn't for synchronizing my PDF collection with PDF Reader on my iPad.
- firecall 4y ago
  > Also, is there something that prevents me from just running Maestral and having access to my dropbox stuff just like before? For basic synching, I dont think so. I'm running Maestral on Macs and Linux boxes with no issues. I only have the official client installed on my iPhone and one Windows PC. If I need to sync files from a Linux server over to my Mac, I still find Dropbox with Maestral to be the simplest reliable low-effort method.
willyt 4y ago
I don’t want dummy files that only download when I want to use them. I work with a lot of 100-500mb files and I will be really annoyed if I have a 30second delay every time I open one of these or even worse not be able to access them because the internet is down wherever I am. I’ve already moved to Nextcloud but if I hadn’t this would push me to.
say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
Next we'll see an apple file sharing service heavily marketed
willyt 4y ago
I mostly don’t use it much anymore but is dropbox going to convert all my files to download on demand without me explicitly asking it to? Is it possible to have it keep all files synced by default or do i have to configure this for every file?
hartator 4y ago
It seems mostly regressions. Why the update in the first place?
rcarmo 4y ago
This is about the same kind of experience I currently have with OneDrive, "thanks" to the File Provider APIs. One thing that I am especially annoyed about is that Spotlight in Ventura now refuses to do something as simple as launching document files from a file provider, or to open their containing folder (which is a Ventura/Spotlight bug and definitely not a OneDrive one).
- joshspankit 4y ago
  Does anyone have recommendations for a Spotlight replacement (that doesn’t use spotlight under the hood)? Different but related issue: Spotlight breaks for me constantly (there’s a corrupted file somewhere in the TBs and while it breaks the index, the logs are an unhelpful firehose). Last time I looked, all the replacements were just using the Spotlight index. Sounds like it’s time for the community to show how bloated and restrictive Spotlight has become.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    The community can't really match what Spotlight can do under the hood, I'm afraid. There is a huge amount of engineering effort that went into the indexing, data extraction and filesystem integrations that you can't just go and reimplement from scratch. Regardless, I went and filed feedback #FB11980196 today, in the hope that Apple actually looks at these things (but I've been around since the Radar days, so I have little hope).
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      No I’m sure that no one can match what Spotlight does under the hood (I assume most of the necessary APIs are locked down), however I and many others could replace spotlight with something that goes oldschool: search folder/filenames. It would allow us to launch applications quickly, open calendar if we need to search for an event, open contacts if we need to search for contact info, and find files that we’ve saved to the local disk. Bonus points if it also does math and currency conversion, but at least for me: entirely optional.
zbentley 4y ago
What's the motivation for needing to use the FileSync API? Surely users with Dropboxes that take up undesirable or larger-than-free-space amounts of space are a minority. Is there something about that minority that makes it likely to grow? Is it as simple as "Dropbox will add features to serve customers on paid plans even if those features cripple the experience for users on free (read: small) plans"?
- Groxx 4y ago
  tbh I suspect it's to keep using transparently-downloaded "online but listed in finder" files, due to Apple clamping down hard on kexts. Which I honestly hate and won't touch anyway. So this is mostly just pushing me to finally leave Dropbox completely.

180 points by jez 4y ago

nvr219 4y ago

ugh why

pancrufty 4y ago
It’s not 2007 anymore and Dropbox isn’t a plain “rsync GUI” anymore. It’s been obvious for years now that they don’t care about technical users so we should not use it anymore. I probably moved on in 2017.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Agreed. I use Syncthing[1] and it's great. It just sits in the background and works like Dropbox used to. If you have a NAS or some other always-on machine it acts as a good master for syncing things. [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
  - eropple 4y ago
    I haven't looked at Syncthing in a few years. What's the best way to get files on an iOS device, without syncing them all to the device? (I use this a lot in Dropbox to grab a picture or something and use the OS share functionality to send it to Slack or whatever.)
- thevagrant 4y ago
  Why though? Surely there is a reason they changed their sync process.

pancrufty 4y ago

They’re moving to a modern API. Where the files are stored makes little difference to the user. The only problem I see is that they’re dropping support for files stored on external drives: that should have been the title.

nicoburns 4y ago
> Where the files are stored makes little difference to the user. I beg to differ. A common use case for dropbox is to sync files used by other programs, and you can't always change the storage location that they use. This breaks that use case. I don't really understand why Apple have done this. Seems like a big regression in functionality to me.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  If I remember right, the Dropbox folder is originally ~/Dropbox anyway, right? You can't just sync arbitrary stuff in your home folder using it without getting into symlinks in the first place.
  - pancrufty 4y ago
    That’s right. I think people forget now Dropbox works. It mentions this in the linked document, it explicitly says you have to recreate the links. But no, downvote the people who know how to read instead.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    For a less technically-savvy user there's a big difference between "my spreadsheet is in the Dropbox folder" vs. "my spreadsheet is in Library/CloudStorage". Especially when the "~/Library" folder is hidden by default.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      In fairness, I think these new "file providers" show up the Finder sidebar by default.
    - pancrufty 4y ago
      Less technically-savvy people don’t know what you’re talking about. It still looks like a folder in the sidebar.
  - kccqzy 4y ago

ec109685 4y ago

Pretty lame that Apple blocked syncing of iPhotos libraries.

AlexandrB 4y ago
Yeah, that jumped out to me too. I wonder what their justification is? Seems like another anti-competitive restriction.
- simondotau 4y ago
  I imagine there’s a possible justification of libraries getting broken because Photos.app doesn’t know how to handle partial syncs gracefully. Many apps don’t. (Though I also agree Apple really does need to clean up its own room before worrying about what third party software is doing.)
  - huggingmouth 4y ago
    Wait. I thought partial syncs are never visible to the rest of the system. Files are either synced or they're not. AFAIK, synching does it this way.
    - zbentley 4y ago
      Doing an atomic-swap sync of a folder (which is what a photo library is) can result in momentary doubling of size-on-disk. For something as big as a photo library that may not be acceptable/possible. The solution (differential syncs with atomic update and with support for the version being diffed against changing during the sync) are quite tricky to get working reliability, and they get less reliable the larger the atomic unit of data is. All that is also assuming that there's a way for the sync program to interpret what units (files or folders) the user wants to be updated slowly/expensively/atomically, which is itself very hard to solve without adding friction or foot guns.
      - kccqzy 4y ago

jongala 4y ago

IMO the other really big deal here is that ~/Library is a hidden folder by default. For most users Dropbox will only be exposed under the "Locations" section in finder sidebars. That feels like a huge regression to me — the whole idea of Dropbox was "a folder, that syncs." An invisible folder that syncs is much worse!

pancrufty 4y ago
Clearly it’s not invisible. While you can’t target it by typing ~/Dropbox, people using the Finder won’t notice a difference.
- knaik94 4y ago
  If a user can't open or target a folder by typing in the location, it's useless for any meaningful file management. This feels like macOS is becoming more like iOS instead of the other way around. There is a setting to re-enable it, but it shouldn't need a setting.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Finder -> Go -> Go to Folder .. And being able to open a file by its path is not a requirement for meaningful file management. It's something only power users would do and for them the Terminal is always going to be a far better choice.
    - knaik94 4y ago
      That's a very low bar to set for "power user". By that standard even users wanting to install Dropbox and managing files themselves would be enough to count as a "power user". Recommending the use of a terminal is even more of a regression. It's not a far better choice, it's not even a good choice for file management. Basically everything is slower through a terminal interface.
      - arthurcolle 4y ago

chadlavi 4y ago

Ok what the fuck. This breaks a ton of stuff for me. You can't put it anywhere else??? Edit: for the first time in a decade I'm considering Dropbox alternatives. This is a lot of different ways for a product to suddenly get crappier.

CamperBob2 4y ago
Dropbox gets skeevier and skeevier every time I install it. It used to be a snap to install and get working, now it's more about their business needs than mine. There is (still) room for competition in this space.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  If it is true that Apple is forcing their hand here, then whatever competition you find isn't going to be much better, unfortunately.
  - baby 4y ago
    Usually if you use apple devices you have to use apple apps. They tend to slowly kill the competition by improving things for themselves. So I would say iCloud is the way to go here.
    - alpaca128 4y ago
      What do you mean? I've got two Macs without iCloud account and aside from Finder & Mail I use almost zero Apple applications. Seems to work quite well including two Nextcloud accounts (aside from general system instability), though I've not been on Mac OS for long yet.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        Apple has a bit of a history removing software features from the Mac. Nvidia driver support, 32-bit application support, OpenGL support and GNU support has all been dropped by Apple over the years. The longer I owned my Mac, the less capable it became.

CodeWriter23 4y ago

ln -s ~/Dropbox ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox (Unless I’ve reversed link_name and target)

jtokoph 4y ago
You have reversed it. I used to reverse it all the time until I came up with a simple way to remember it. Just think of the mv or cp command, the first argument is always the original thing that exists already. It's the same with ln. The first argument is the existing path you want to make a link to.
- meling 4y ago
  Yes, and you don’t even need to pass the destination name if it is the same as the source (if your current directory is ~/ of course…) ln -s ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox
  - jdshaffer 4y ago
    Should a symlink also work to solve the "Dropbox on an external drive" issue that this change will create? (I suspect it will as a folder is a folder as far as the OS is concerned, but I haven't tinkered much with symlinks).
    - meling 4y ago
      I don’t think so, unless you are able to create a symlink from the Library/CloudStorage folder to an external drive. I suspect there are some limitations related to this. But I haven’t tried this specific case. But on advice from Dropbox support I did try to symlink from Dropbox to ‘Dropbox (UniName)’ to avoid the space and parentheses in the folder name. This seemingly worked, but after weeks of syncing problems I capitulated and instead link in the other direction… (this isn’t solving the problem of space in the folder name that some software doesn’t like, but syncing now works at least)
      - 4y ago

mattl 4y ago

Maestral is a great app for Dropbox on Mac OS X. Highly recommended.

gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 4y ago

Man.. I really miss Steve. He never would have let this bastardization of the desktop machine operating system happen. The only thing consistent with every new macOS release at this point is the removal of more features I heavily relied on and the addition of ever more iOS transplants that make zero sense in the context of a desktop computer.

azinman2 4y ago
What was removed?
etchalon 4y ago
Steve would 100% of done this. Steve didn't care about vendors.
- baby 4y ago
  Tbf he was willing to break things and not provide backward compatibility forever, which I think is great if you want to keep innovating and keep improving things at your layer. It works as long as the layers above keep adapting, which so far they have done
michelb 4y ago
Steve hated Dropbox, he would have tried to kill it.

brundolf 4y ago

What alternatives do people like these days for "just sync/backup a folder"? I would really like to avoid self-managing something if I can

dlyons 4y ago
Syncthing. It's amazing. I use it across my NixOS workstation, M1 Macbook, home lab server (acting as an "always on" folder to always fetch syncs), and my Steam Deck. If you use Nix it's really easy to setup: https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/nixos/default.nix#L100 https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/nixos/...
- brundolf 4y ago
  > I would really like to avoid self-managing something if I can :) Unless there's some managed syncthing service I don't know about. I want to learn Nix for this even less than I want to manage it by hand on a VPS
  - dlyons 4y ago
    You don't host it. It just talks to each of your machines peer-to-peer. Just run it on each machine and it works like magic.
    - brundolf 4y ago
      I would like something on the cloud in case of physical disaster. That's the main reason I use Dropbox, to be honest
      - dlyons 4y ago
        It keeps multiple copies of your data on whatever machine is running syncthing. So if you lose data on one machine, it's still safe on another. Sure if all machines go at once, you're screwed. But I'm not too worried about that, personally. If you have something you absolutely can't lose just stick it in a Backblaze bucket and use syncthing for the rest. Backblaze is cheap and has both an API and web interface.

morpheuskafka 4y ago

Similar changes (including the same local path change) made by other cloud providers: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/12178485 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/12178485 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/inside-the-new-files-on-demand-experience-on-macos/ba-p/3058922 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-bl... https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/01/onedrive-mac-users-unhappy-files-on-demand/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/01/onedrive-mac-users-unha...

shortformblog 4y ago

Wow, this is terrible. As a critic of their slowness, I can now see why they dragged their feet on Apple Silicon for so long—the File Provider API really just trashes the experience. In a world where Apple no longer allows for internal storage upgrades, the fact that you can only store your Dropbox on your main drive is just such a joke. This is the degradation of the experience by a thousand API changes. I moved to SyncThing/local syncing in response to Dropbox’s moves last year, and I gotta say I am not regretting it one bit.

starwatch 4y ago
The one thing that's kept me from SyncThing is the lack of iOS integration [1]. But the changes Apple has forced on Dropbox here is making me reconsider. [1]: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102 https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102
- vladharbuz 4y ago
  Möbius Sync works well on iOS, I use it regularly.
  - shortformblog 4y ago
    This is what I use.
- zuhsetaqi 4y ago
  How has Apple forced them to do those changes? Apples APIs only allows it that way but Dropbox don’t have to use those APIs. There‘re other Cloud Sync clients that just work fine supporting all those features without using Apples APIs. So Dropbox decided to switch to using Apples APIs knowing that it‘ll lack those features.
- ghusto 4y ago
  I switched from Syncthing, to Sync.com, and now finally to a combination of pCloud for archiving, and Syncthing for everyday files. I'm happy with this set up, and recommend it. EDIT: My motivation was wanting reliable end-to-end encryption. The lack of iOS support isn't an issue for me either, since one of the reasons I avoided iPhones was precisely because I knew things like this would at some point be a blocker. 99% of the time, iPhones are fine, but that 1% of issues that Apple policy causes is dealbreakingly bad.

iansinnott 4y ago

Worth mention the open source project Maestral: https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral (an unofficial Dropbox client)

Groxx 4y ago
It has a horrifically long initial sync for me (hours of silence and no apparent activity), but yep. I do not miss the official client in the slightest after switching - it has been significantly faster and better-behaved in every imaginable way. In particular, I no longer have to stare at Dropbox and wonder why it hasn't uploaded my tiny plain text file change for several hours. Which I've had to do regularly for the past couple years. Maestral consistently uploads within seconds.
aryehof 4y ago
Gets an upvote for me. Maestral has been efficiently syncing my Mac for at least 2 years now, through the whole no available M1 arm client and other Dropbox turmoil.
joshstrange 4y ago
I've been using it since shortly before the M1 Max came out and I quite prefer it. No nonsense and it makes Dropbox function like I want it to (just a folder that syncs). I wish it has some better activity reporting (when I'm waiting on a large file to sync that I want to share I'm in the dark) but for fire-and-forget storage it's great.

mnalex 4y ago

OneDrive did the same thing.

krono 4y ago

Rclone is a FOSS alternative interface (CLI) to many cloud storage providers and provides some neat extra functionality. It has been working very well for me with OneDrive and S3, but of course use at your own risk. https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/

blipmusic 4y ago
Using it with Dropbox and target my code-in-progress for manual "selective" sync. The filter list is nice to avoid syncing compilation artifacts.

shortcake27 4y ago

FFS. I haven't enjoyed Dropbox since they disallowed symlinks. For many years I kept my home directory stock and created symlinks within Dropbox for Music, Pictures, and Documents etc. Then for some reason they actively prevented symlinks, so I swapped it around and moved the directories into Dropbox and symlinked from my home directory. This broke icons in Finder sidebar with no way to fix. It also breaks navigation in Finder, eg go into ~/Pictures and go back up and you're in ~/Dropbox, not home. I hate it. Now, the path is going to get even worse and my real directory for Pictures will be something like "~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/Pictures" instead of "~/Pictures". I was excited when they announced Dropbox backup, I gave it a shot and it just did the exact same thing - it moved the real directories into an obscure location within ~/Dropbox and created symlinks in the home directory . It is genuinely amazing how Dropbox worked better for me 10 years ago than it does today. But I've been scared to move off Dropbox because of how reliable it is. I tried Google Drive a while ago and it was extremely buggy, all my files got duplicated, and I had no trust in the service. Wouldn't go with Google for other reasons these days. I was considering Sync last year, think I'm going to bite the bullet and give it a go.

jamesgeck0 4y ago
All cloud file sync services on macOS are ultimately going to have similar issues unless Apple dramatically improves the API they're forcing everyone to use.
- shortcake27 4y ago
  Yeah good point, I just read the other comments where many other cloud sync services have regressed too.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Groxx 4y ago
  As a user of both a recent OSX and an M1, and using multiple other syncing services: nah. Others are doing just fine. Dropbox is likely being pig-headed about something, forcing them into this awful corner, and they're loudly blaming Apple for it (partially justifiably, partially "if it hurts when you do that, don't do that"). My guess is it's the transparently download when accessed files, due to losing a lot of kext abilities through the years. Apple hasn't blocked applications from changing files or using file notification events, so "normal" syncing things are still running just fine.

newscracker 4y ago

The only reason I’ve remained on the Dropbox free plan for a decade is because in the early years I was able to boost the free space to 25GB through referrals and contests. I use it as a quick way to sync files and access them from mobile devices (I have separate online backups not dependent on this). I’m not interested in buying yet another cloud storage plan from the major providers just for this. From this article, it seems like support for macOS Big Sur (and prior releases) will be dropped in the coming months. That plus the dropping of LAN Sync, which was great when it worked, means I’d have to consider dropping Dropbox. I’ve tried Maestral (https://maestral.app/ https://maestral.app/) once last year and it made a mess of the files while the official Dropbox client was being used by another user (not at the same time). So I switched back to the official client. If there are good clients that would continue to work (don’t know what the Dropbox server side changes are), I could continue using it.

jez 4y ago

A lot of people are taking this as yet another example of Dropbox changing things for no reason, but I think it’s important to make clear that in this case Apple is forcing their hand. Dropbox is being told by Apple that apps must integrate with File Provider API[1] if they want to present files that don't exist on disk until they’re first opened. This API is hamstrung and limiting, full of instabilities and quirks (designed to fit iCloud primarily but not necessarily everyone else). In my opinion, the fault lies with Apple here. [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider (Full disclosure: I interned at Dropbox for 3 months 8 years ago.)

flangola7 4y ago
I don't see how Apple can force the matter. Why would Dropbox comply if it breaks things?
- Twisell 4y ago
  They can't force but they can't retract from the AppStore. You'd still be able to deliver outside the AppStore with a signed App on MacOS but with way less visibility.
  - jshier 4y ago
    Who's discovering DropBox from the App Store? Seems like they could drop that and be just fine. Much smaller devs have.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    Who installs anything to a desktop computer from an app store instead of the developer's website?
    - msingh_5 4y ago
      I prefer installing things from App Store on my parents' computers cause it will handle automatic updates and provides certain guarantees (i.e. can rely on Apple not letting malware onto their App Store).

nosefrog 4y ago

When I was at Dropbox, one of the big threats to the business we talked about was OS's banning file sync applications and forcing them to use their own APIs for them instead. It looks like that's finally happening now, unfortunately.

baby 4y ago
It’s interesting how Apple is making so many enemies in tech. When I was at Facebook it was the same, with mark encouraging people to get android phones. I see that amazon, twitter, and the gaming industry all have issues with apple too. It’s interesting to say the least. I just cancelled my twitter blue membership when I learned that I was going to pay more just because I subscribed through iOS, thinking I will resub from dekstop, but then never did. I also ended up buying a bunch of audiobooks and books through apple books because I never could do it through kindle and the amazon apps. I can’t imagine I’m the only one.
wtallis 4y ago
It doesn't look like that's what's happening. This is only an issue because Dropbox isn't trying to be a file sync application any more, and is instead trying to be a userspace network filesystem driver.
- moonlighter 4y ago
  Exactly that! Compare the simplicity from the original Dropbox app to the behemoth of what it is now...
  - wtallis 4y ago
    The original Dropbox wasn't just simple to use, it was also simple to understand: you knew what it was doing and how it worked, well enough to have correct expectations about how it would behave in circumstances like having a slow or broken internet connection. I guess they now consider those circumstances to be so exceptionally rare that they can be ignored.
- joshspankit 4y ago

codazoda 4y ago

My first response was rage but on more careful reading, this doesn’t change much for me. I can probably symlink ~/Dropbox to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox and call it a day. Here’s why it doesn’t affect me much, which I mostly wrote to calm my own nerves… - I have a bunch of scripts, aliases, crons, and other console things that rely on ~/Dropbox. A symlink should fix that and it looks like Dropbox will create one automatically when it moves the folder. - I can create a new favorite to the new folder in Finder. I use a single subdirectory (my name) so, if I can only do this with a subdirectory, not the Dropbox root, that’s fine. I presume I can do it with root too though. - I don’t store Dropbox files on an external drive. Seems like I could never get this to work right. I just use my internal. I guess I got lucky here. - I don’t use many of Apples Proprietary tools that use flattened package files. I onky use Photo’s temporarily, and I don’t really use Pages, Numbers, or Keys. But, if I did, they only really work on Mac, so this seems like a sane change to me. I mostly use similar cross platform apps like Libre Office if I want it to be portable. - I don’t search in Finder, I just use spotlight, which continues to work the same way. - I might have 300k files, I’m not sure. I try to organize photos into folder annually to cut down the number. Lots of things have trouble with this many files. I already try to organize around similar limitations. - I’m already on MacOS 13. MacOS 12 seems to have a handful of file issues that probably wouldn’t affect me anyways, but definitely won’t under 13. - I don’t use LAN syncing. - I keep almost all of my files in offline mode (on the local machine, taking up space, duplicates, etc).

eslaught 4y ago
> Files added to your Dropbox account from another device or that are shared by another user will default to online-only. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this completely breaks the sync model if you use more than one computer. It used to be you could add a file on machine A, and without any user interaction, it would sync to machine B. Now that's broken unless I go and manually mark every top-level folder as offline. And don't ever add anything to the root of your Dropbox folder....
- codazoda 4y ago
  Could be true. In an act of luck, I created a folder for myself and that’s all I sync. So, if I can set this at the folder level, I just set that one folder to offline and I’m good. It’s just happen-stance that I set mine up this way years ago though.

perryizgr8 4y ago

I don't understand why Dropbox has to do all this. Can't they just manage all files by themselves? Just open and close files like any program. No need to use whatever new bs API apple is pushing. This is macos, not iOS. You can still run any turing complete software. Or am I mistaken with that assumption?

wtallis 4y ago
It seems like Dropbox of today is trying to be a completely different tool than what Dropbox originally was. Their goal is no longer to sync files that reside on a folder on your machines, but instead to store files primarily in the cloud and present the illusion that they reside on your machine. Apparently the Apple API for doing the latter comes with restrictions that make it more obvious that Dropbox has abandoned its original purpose. Personally, I like the idea of forcing files that don't really exist on my machine to be presented through a different UI and namespace than files that are actually locally available. A complicated overlay mount of a network filesystem and a local caching layer is not something that should be shoehorned into an unsuspecting user's home directory. It's trying to present an abstraction that has too many pitfalls.
systoll 4y ago
Prior to 2016, the dropbox app managed which files were synced with your filesystem, and you could always go into the Dropbox app to see the files that weren't synced. As of 2016, dropbox started to intercept calls to open/move/delete files at the kernel level – https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/going-deeper-with-project-infinite https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/going-deeper-with-projec... – this allowed them to create proxies for all the files that weren’t synced, and to then download them whenever something tried to open them. The API they used for that was always intended for Antivirus and similar programs, but it worked. Apple replaced that API with a new one which is a lot more narrowly targeted to Antivirus, and dropbox couldn’t use it. Dropbox could try and do things without any API, but they’d get themselves kicked off the App Store, they’d need to convince users to turn off 'System Integrity Protection' which would try to keep the OS kernel unmodified, and their implementation would be prone to breaking at any time. Just managing the files by themselves would essentially be going back to the pre-2016 approach, and the file provider API is better than that.

0x17051D37 4y ago

I dropped DropBox years ago, and rely only on LucidLink(www.lucidlink.com)

donatj 4y ago

> Existing packages will be updated to the new format the next time they are changed and synced. > Flattened packages can only be accessed on devices running Dropbox for macOS. Does this mean they are altering my existing Numbers and Keynote bundles in a way that makes them only accessible in macOS? That's problematic

kccqzy 4y ago
I believe Numbers and Keynote stopped using bundles (aka packages) since iWork ’09.

miga 4y ago

"In order to integrate application with the operating system, we will downgrade the following features and worsen user experience: ..."

photoGrant 4y ago

The lack of local sync on LAN has severely crippled our teams on-site in limited wifi scenarios. We've been moving our solutions away from Dropbox.

meling 4y ago

I’m sooo annoyed with our Dropbox for education account, insisting to name the folder as ‘Dropbox (UniName)’? (I think this also applies to enterprise accounts…) This is a Dropbox problem as my org can only influence the name inside the parentheses. There are two bad things with this folder naming… the parentheses and the space. I still use software the does not work well with spaces and parentheses in folder names. There is an open issue about this with 100s of complaints, and Dropbox just ignores the problem. PS: symlinking doesn’t always solve the problem. And this new scheme to put it in Library/CloudStorage will make path names even longer… (sometimes my terminal prompt resolves the full path instead of the symlink; never took the time to figure out why) Anyone that have solutions to these issues, I would love to hear about it.

baby 4y ago
> space. I still use software the does not work well with spaces and parentheses in folder names It sounds like that should be fixed instead no?
- meling 4y ago
  Sure. But it is sometimes hard to debug… (even to identify this as the culprit). For example, for a while one of the vscode plugins that I use just stopped working and it took quite a while for me to figure out why it had stopped working. There were no errors reported in the log. Only once I suspected what the problem was, did I move my project out of Dropbox to a local folder without space to confirm my suspicions. But the fact that several 100s of other people experienced similar or worse problems made this naming scheme a bad choice imo. A simple Dropbox-UniName would’ve avoided the problem for lots of people… That said, I don’t even see the reason to force a specific naming scheme for people’s local Dropbox folder. They should allow me to name the folder X or D on my drive. But maybe it’s just me that don’t like long path names…

RagnarD 4y ago

I dropped Dropbox years ago when it had the gall to assert that MP3s that I'd ripped from my own CDs were "pirated". I won't use a system that snoops on the files I store with it. I suggest looking at Sync.com as an alternative. They don't hold the master encryption password for your files.

sneak 4y ago
Syncthing makes paying for dropbox obsolete.
baby 4y ago
Wait what? I’ve always stored my whole MP3 collections there, since the early days of dropbox, and never heard of that
cal85 4y ago
Are you sure you are remembering right? Dropbox scans your files for copyright infringement? Has anyone else encountered this?
- kilroy123 4y ago
  Yes. They nuked my account and I lost over a decade's worth of data in a moment.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  Most cloud services do it. Microsoft has been scanning all uploaded pictures for their visual contents for years, Google had this famous case last year where they reported a Drive user for an uploaded picture. It's E2E encrypted or they have full access and make use of it, simple as that.

jbverschoor 4y ago

Guess it makes sense now to look for something else and use Dropbox for the occasional sharing of files between people

moonlighter 4y ago

This was the final straw which prompted me to move off Dropbox. Initially, dropbox was wonderful, super simple and did ONE thing amazingly well. Then... the thing morphed into a monster with all sorts of "corporate america" features which I never cared for. Fine, they need to make money, I get it. Besides storing and syncing files, the dropbox app on iOS was amazing to take quick scans of receipts on the phone and sync them to the Mac and auto-process them there (via the receipts.app; great 3rd party app). Anyway, in 2023, iCloud Drive with the native Files.app on iOS does the same thing for me. Just as good, just as reliable. For free, without the bulky corporate app stuff.

Joeri 4y ago
But … icloud benefits from being part of the OS. Dropbox is probably technically unable to build a service that works as smoothly as icloud. It seems unfair to ding dropbox for that situation. Having said that, I use icloud as well, together with syncthing.

jwr 4y ago

I'm slightly confused. I read through the entire list carefully, and there are multiple downsides for the changes. The only potential benefit is that files can "pretend" to be there, and be automatically fetched over the network when needed, which is something that I would consider a downside, as I'd much rather have a full copy of my entire tree locally, so that I'm certain it's there when I'm offline. So why do it at all? Why not drop the feature of "pretend you're there" and just continue like before? The downsides seem massive to me. Also, is there something that prevents me from just running Maestral and having access to my dropbox stuff just like before? These days most of my important stuff gets synchronized using syncthing. It's much more performant, became extremely reliable over the years, doesn't hog my CPU like crazy, and doesn't show upsell banners and prompts. I would have dropped Dropbox a long time ago if it wasn't for synchronizing my PDF collection with PDF Reader on my iPad.

firecall 4y ago
> Also, is there something that prevents me from just running Maestral and having access to my dropbox stuff just like before? For basic synching, I dont think so. I'm running Maestral on Macs and Linux boxes with no issues. I only have the official client installed on my iPhone and one Windows PC. If I need to sync files from a Linux server over to my Mac, I still find Dropbox with Maestral to be the simplest reliable low-effort method.

willyt 4y ago

I don’t want dummy files that only download when I want to use them. I work with a lot of 100-500mb files and I will be really annoyed if I have a 30second delay every time I open one of these or even worse not be able to access them because the internet is down wherever I am. I’ve already moved to Nextcloud but if I hadn’t this would push me to.

say_it_as_it_is 4y ago

Next we'll see an apple file sharing service heavily marketed

willyt 4y ago

I mostly don’t use it much anymore but is dropbox going to convert all my files to download on demand without me explicitly asking it to? Is it possible to have it keep all files synced by default or do i have to configure this for every file?

hartator 4y ago

It seems mostly regressions. Why the update in the first place?

rcarmo 4y ago

This is about the same kind of experience I currently have with OneDrive, "thanks" to the File Provider APIs. One thing that I am especially annoyed about is that Spotlight in Ventura now refuses to do something as simple as launching document files from a file provider, or to open their containing folder (which is a Ventura/Spotlight bug and definitely not a OneDrive one).

joshspankit 4y ago
Does anyone have recommendations for a Spotlight replacement (that doesn’t use spotlight under the hood)? Different but related issue: Spotlight breaks for me constantly (there’s a corrupted file somewhere in the TBs and while it breaks the index, the logs are an unhelpful firehose). Last time I looked, all the replacements were just using the Spotlight index. Sounds like it’s time for the community to show how bloated and restrictive Spotlight has become.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  The community can't really match what Spotlight can do under the hood, I'm afraid. There is a huge amount of engineering effort that went into the indexing, data extraction and filesystem integrations that you can't just go and reimplement from scratch. Regardless, I went and filed feedback #FB11980196 today, in the hope that Apple actually looks at these things (but I've been around since the Radar days, so I have little hope).
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    No I’m sure that no one can match what Spotlight does under the hood (I assume most of the necessary APIs are locked down), however I and many others could replace spotlight with something that goes oldschool: search folder/filenames. It would allow us to launch applications quickly, open calendar if we need to search for an event, open contacts if we need to search for contact info, and find files that we’ve saved to the local disk. Bonus points if it also does math and currency conversion, but at least for me: entirely optional.

zbentley 4y ago

What's the motivation for needing to use the FileSync API? Surely users with Dropboxes that take up undesirable or larger-than-free-space amounts of space are a minority. Is there something about that minority that makes it likely to grow? Is it as simple as "Dropbox will add features to serve customers on paid plans even if those features cripple the experience for users on free (read: small) plans"?

Groxx 4y ago
tbh I suspect it's to keep using transparently-downloaded "online but listed in finder" files, due to Apple clamping down hard on kexts. Which I honestly hate and won't touch anyway. So this is mostly just pushing me to finally leave Dropbox completely.