Expected changes with Dropbox for macOS
help.dropbox.com
help.dropbox.com
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
(Full disclosure: I interned at Dropbox for 3 months 8 years ago.)
I think for tools like like Box or even OneDrive, this move makes sense for, but Dropbox is intended to be a living backup of your primary folders, and that model just doesn’t fit with this.
This is almost bad enough to the point where the right play might be to have a machine on another platform, like Linux or Windows, manage your file sync, then to just access it on your local network. Apple really messed this up.
"If in folder X expect content to require fetching depending on application Y settings and act/manage exceptions accordingly. You can use that API if needed than standardize sync states across providers"
It is easier to exclude or target specifically for backup, easier to know you shouldn't store there for offline use, etc...
Being forced into OneDrive on Windows10 for corporate need since 10 month, I can tell you it's unbelievably easy to misconfigure OneDrive into a slugish unresponsive nightmare. Especially if you dare mix Organization OneDrive and Organization Sharepoint "mount points" in not exactly the good non obvious way. (never ever for hell's sake use the sync button in SharePoint website, use add to your OneDrive button)
There’s standardization and there’s treating every cloud service like it should only work in one way.
Dropbox for years sold itself as being intended to work as your hard drive that could follow you as you switched devices. But now it’s working on a platform that actively discourages its use in that way, one that is operated by a company that is a direct competitor to Dropbox (albeit one that is not cross-platform). It feels like they’re getting crunched by standardization that is meant to disrupt their business model.
Now is that business model struggling for other reasons? Sure. But it shouldn’t be missed how this shift is arguably more disruptive to Dropbox than many of its competitors.
I’m not saying that standardization isn’t a good idea. But the API clearly was built without a lot of input from users of these services to understand why they want them to work in certain ways.
As others and the suport page pointed you, you can still put a symlink at any available location you want.
It's still fully usable but it's now garanteed to not mess around with others contents. I personally am an iCloud Drive user at home because if I already chose to trust Apple for the OS and all, using their (contractually paid for) sync service doesn't require me to trust another party.
Standardization and sandboxing of cloud providers actually make me think about subscribing to a third party (for diversification let's say, or for separation of concerns when sharing on pro/other context). Because if standardized I can be assured by OS policy that theses sync services won't fuck around anywhere else than in their designated folder.
So yeah, maybe from now on you'd better go for rsync based tools that don't target App Store for pro use. But for 90% of the target audience this might actually be a desirable feature.
No, but what the OP meant was that Dropbox users think of it as a replacement for an external hard drive with all your projects. (Myself, I consider Dropbox, OneDrive, and iCloud Drive, to be the same thing with a different corporate overlord, and I migrated from Dropbox to OneDrive without any changes to my workflows…)
> It's still fully usable but it's now garanteed to not mess around with others contents.
How would it mess around before? Do you have any examples?
It's just that globally I'm not fond of background processes that run without being properly sandboxed through the OS. I'm less regarding when using FOSS software but for commercial closed source solution like dropbox I'd rather have them run with limited privileges.
In particular, I point to the move that you have to now keep the storage on the main drive, and the move to block access to the Mac’s photos library. Neither of these moves were necessary for sandboxing reasons. Both degrade the experience for Dropbox users that may have a folder far larger than the 256GB many base Macs come with.
Apple could have accounted for use cases of this nature to allow them to make sense for existing Dropbox users. They didn’t.
Sandboxing can be good in theory but completely suck in execution. That, I argue, is what happened here.
I can agree however on your last point, it could have been nice to allow cloud storage to be moved to an external HD. Maybe they should bring back this possibility in a futur update.
But for the managed photo library nothing currently prevent you from storing your database in an external drive, it's only cloud storage that is forbidden for the previously mentioned concurrency issues.
Please keep in mind that Cloud storage is not an external hard drive storage, it's not local, it's not a backup either (I personally backup regularly files on my cloud storage in 2 separates offline external HD and everyone should at least get one. Otherwise you actually have no backup).
I am using both of these, direct sync of SharePoint libraries (what you call Organization Sharepoint) as well as linking the libraries to the personal library (what you call Organization OneDrive) and have never had any issues. What are your problems with it?
The only thing one has to know is that it's not possible to do both at the same time for a given directory: a synced folder (and its children) can't be linked to personal and a linked folder (and its children) can't be synced. Note that "linking" also "syncs" it, just in a different location.
So when you happen to work with 10+ Sharepoint sites there is two way to operate if you must sync.
1. Click sync on the document library. Then each sync while need a configuration entry in One Drive and each sync will create it's own background worker. Prioritization between sync/mounts point must happen somehow but if you open 10+ I experienced lot's of sync error/delay. Sync parameters to each sharepoint have to be defined manually and independently on all your devices.
2.You can add a "shortcut" pointing to the sharepoint into your organization (personal) OneDrive. The configuration is then stored on your OneDrive profile, it's synchronized across all you device and the OneDrive webapp. You can move the shortcut around (inside your OneDrive) and rename the folder as you which. It only require one background worker that don't compete for system ressources with others.
I was initially configured using solution 1 and experienced many conflict/lag/bug. Since I implemented aolution 2 everything is (almost) flawless.
So the question remain why do they offer two concuring implementations one of which can lead to madness... legacy support I guess.
I mean, the Internet has known for a long time that you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem…
I don't use Mac
It does prevent
- Unsuspecting or otherwise ignorant users from being tricked into installing a malicious kernel extension. - Prevent large companies from distributing custom kernel extensions for every day users
AFAIK loading custom kexts has become harder since the launch of TouchID on macs, but for an average user its better to live inside the secure world of Apple's tight security controls & encryption - allowing Apple to claim security & privacy as core selling points.
Loading kexts require disabling SIP (System Integrity Protection).
Rosetta 2 makes x86_64 binaries run on Apple Silicon (arm64).
You can dive deep into Apple's platform security guide + arch: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...
Dropbox wants to offer some features that are only available through Apple’s API. They want to be on the App Store. But they need to weigh that against what still is their primary feature, and literally how the product was described when sold. “A folder synchronized across all your devices.”
I am not a product manager, but I simply would not throw out my main feature and the thing that differentiates me in the market, in order to provide some features Apple wants, where the only difference between me and OneDrive is the icon.
Non-techies will find it incredibly annoying to map individual subtrees leading to missing files, upfront sync costs when you need those, and running out of disk space. Dropbox cannot afford to simply throw their hands up and blame the users for not being technical enough.
That said, this hack (pretending your files are on disk) is arguably a fragile one, and perhaps shouldn’t exist in the first place (assuming it’s not a networked file system, which I believe it’s not). Or at the very least, they could have attempted to publish a standard. But if dropbox is just another proprietary piece of software running hacks, I can’t really blame Apple.
Especially now, when companies are cutting their spend, this is an extraordinary misstep. If I am already paying for iCloud, Google Apps, or Office 365, I can get exactly what Dropbox offers for free, and better integrated with the other productivity apps.
So why exactly would anyone use Dropbox now? There is nothing to differentiate them.
It’s hard to see this as anything other than the beginning of the end for Dropbox.
Their sync is just must faster and they actually do block-level sync, which the other major providers still haven't implemented yet after over ten years. I understand why people go to the competition, but I think it's a mistake. The FAANG offerings just provide enough (especially disk space) to lure people into their ecosystems, but they don't really care much about file sync, and therefore they are all quite miserable.
It is a bit like Microsoft Teams. Companies choose Teams because they have an Office365 subscription for Microsoft Office anyway and it is cheaper than Slack. On the surface, Slack does not seem to have much of a competitive advantage anymore. So, if you are simply bean counting, it's clear that you should switch to Teams. But in the meanwhile, everyone using Teams feels miserable to be trapped in it.
I thought it (BEP) was always a core feature?
Why not? It's a very handy feature for a lot of users who don't have the disk space available to store their complete Dropbox folder. And it's much easier to understand and work with than manually managing selective sync.
Or at the very least, they could have attempted to publish a standard. But if dropbox is just another proprietary piece of software running hacks, I can’t really blame Apple.
Right. The issue is that you need to intercept file I/O to make transparent sync work. Dropbox did this before using a kernel extension, so that it can hook into the kernel kauth framework [1]. However, having third-party code running in kernel space is a huge liability, besides opening a huge possibility for state-sanctioned backdoors, it opens another venue for security vulnerabilities that give kernel-level access. So Apple decided that the kauth API should go (probably for other reasons), but more importantly that thirt-party kexts should go.
In general, I am very happy that Apple is on a mission to ban kexts, I don't want closed source third-party code to run in the kernel. However, it seems that Apple provides replacement userspace APIs, but is not really receptive to issues that developers have with them.
[1] https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/going-deeper-with-projec...
Will you still be able to run open-source or first party (for example, written by yourself) kernel extensions? Or will future macos versions require jailbreaks to get a real root permissions? Genuine question, I'm not too familiar with Apple products and I'm trying to understand why is this a good change. It looks like a limitation imposed on users.
For my money, running custom kernel-mode code is not a concern. Apple is infatuated with remote device attestation for some reason though, so preventing OS modification is paramount for them right now. It's a limitation, but one that's hard to get mad about when Macbooks have a mostly-open bootloader.
> Kexts are no longer recommended for macOS. Kexts risk the integrity and reliability of the operating system. Users should prefer solutions that don’t require extending the kernel and use system extensions instead.
"System extensions", in this context, refers to extensions that the OS loads into userspace. Apple is developing userspace extension APIs to perform actions that were traditionally handled by popular kexts. The File Provider API is one of these system extensions. Dropbox used to rely on a kernel extension to intercept file access. File Providers allow them to do the same thing, but, as evidenced by this article, there are limitations as to where the files can live, and there are some bugs.
So if the File Provider API is so bad, and it's sill possible to load kexts, why doesn't Dropbox continue to use a kext?
- In 2015, Apple updated the OS to require that kexts be signed by a certificate in the Apple Developer program. This allows Apple to decide who can sign kernel extensions, and allows them to revoke the signing certificate for individual extensions. - In 2017, Apple updated the OS to require a multi-step user confirmation before installing a kext. This initially caused some headaches for system administrators automating the deployment of multiple machines, but eventually solutions to this were implemented. - In 2020, Apple started shipping ARM-based Macs, and by default, they don't allow the loading of any third-party extensions. Instead, users have to go through a process to enable them, and this process can be disabled on managed machines. Here's how Apple describes that process.
> Kext management by the user requires a restart to recoveryOS to downgrade security settings. The user must press and hold the power button to restart into recoveryOS and authenticate as an administrator. Only when recoveryOS is entered using the power button press will the Secure Enclave accept the change of policy. The user must then select the checkbox Reduced Security and the option “Allow user management of kernel extensions from identified developers” and restart the Mac.
All of these requirements can also be bypassed (if the machine is unmanaged or the sysadmin allows it) by turning off System Integrity Protection, which is a similar process as described above. However, disabling SIP disables a lot of security protections in the OS, and turning it off shows a lot of scary dialogues to dissuade users from doing it.
And for most users, SIP is a good tradeoff. It protects against a lot of things that malware can do. It prevents code injection, so dtrace doesn't work with SIP on, but if you're not using dtrace, there's little reason to turn it off.
Either way, the process is complicated enough that not enough users will do it in order to provide a mass market for Dropbox. Apple is also pushing Dropbox to use the File Provider API with the implicit threat of revoking Dropbox's signing certificate for their kext. Apple will not issue signing certificates for products that can be implemented using the userspace system extensions instead, and it's likely that they will continue to restrict the loading of kexts further in the future. Even if users can disable the signing requirement by disabling SIP now, there's no guarantee Apple will allow that to work in the future.
Yeah I wasn’t fully clear.. I don’t mean the feature itself, just the way it was implemented.
I thought the whole point of file syncing software was to sync all files. If I do not have internet access, then would I not be guaranteed to use all the files in my Dropbox folder?
I only use iCloud Drive, does it do the same?
You can always symlink to whatever location Dropbox forces upon you…
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.
So Dropbox decided to switch to using Apples APIs knowing that it‘ll lack those features.
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.
Also, Dropbox has Vault - a more secure folder behind a pin that everyone with access to your screen can't just open. Very useful.
This drive is always syncing to the cloud.
I go home (or travel) and can selectively sync specific projects, which still viewing the entire tree and keeping everything organized.
Neither internal drive is large enough to hold the files.
This workflow is so perfect Ive built my entire creative process around it. It’s completely broken by this change.
I’ve been a huge proponent of Dropbox and pay them over 1k a year as an individual just for this functionality.
As far as I can tell, there is no alternative.
- 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).
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....
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/12178485
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-bl...
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/01/onedrive-mac-users-unha...
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.
Although I do like the "Go To Server" thing in the menu bar when you're in Finder. Easier than remembering the ftp command to do whatever. Plus I can look at FTP directories as if they were just files on my local drive. But other than that... I can't think of 1 single other thing that I would rather do in Finder vs. a terminal of whatever flavor I'm feeling that moment (Alacritty, iTerm, VS Code builtin terminal*)
* yucky!
I admit that I am a power user, I use QTtabbar which gives me tabs in windows explorer, the same functionality is built in macOS finder. I also have keyboard shortcuts for, delete folder and move all contained files to parent folder, delete empty folders, and edit specific metadata, among other things. The single most useful "power user" shortcut that QTtabbar gives me is double click empty space to move view up to parent directory, macOS finder has a keyboard shortcut for that. Android is great for this kind of stuff too, but I have rooted my phone so no folders are hidden. I have termux set up too, the android terminal emulator, so I have grep and sed if I wanted to. I will absolutely everything I can to avoid having to do file management on iOS.
I don't know sure when the accepted definition of "power user" changed from the keyboard shortcut functions I'm describing to navigating view based on path. Knowing and navigating by path feels too basic, to me, to be a qualification for "power user".
I was talking about dealing in path strings which most ordinary people are not normally exposed to. And in that situation Apple provides an easy and obvious method to navigate to it.
And would be very much disagree that everything is slower with a Terminal. In fact most things I do can't even done in the Finder UI.
I agree with you that the Terminal is faster for some things. But let's take an example of moving the last 10 largest files that I downloaded a week ago, but excluding any .mov files or files larger than 2gb. That's not a "power user" operation. With finder, that's 10 mouse clicks in detailed view. Regardless of how skilled you are with a terminal, it will be slower and more inefficient to do the same thing. For the most frequent file management operations, gui will always be better and faster than terminal.
I move files based on size and extension and date ranges. One example would be moving 10 of the the largest video files of various formats, bigger than 150mb, created at least 2 weeks ago, that don't have digits in the name to my secondary hard drive. I am so much faster Ctrl/Command + click/drag instead of command line, especially when I don't know the exact names. In this case imagine the name format is YYYYMMDD[project][camera][resolution][description].[codec], which feels like a nightmare to manage with a terminal.
Windows explorer is set up with custom shortcuts for things like move all files to parent directory and delete folder, delete empty folders in directory, modify created date/other metadata to name some frequent operations. I use QTtabbar on windows for those. It also gives me the double click to move to parent directory shortcut, macOS has a keyboard shortcut for that built-in. Another valuable thing to me is the open with context menu that shows up. I know I can set up ailiases, but I have so many programs that I feel like it would be too many to remember. Tab completion doesn't work efficiently when tens to hundreds of files have the same prefix, for example dates when I'm working on a specific project.
I know I am a power user, but that's also why I feel comfortable asserting gui is better. I even have some nice macros setup using autohotkey for repetitive rename + sorting. Path strings are so useful for file redirecting and management with regex.
You can do
$ chflags nohidden ~/Library
https://www.lifewire.com/os-x-is-hiding-your-library-folder-...
So the tricks Dropbox did early on to show unique icons etc., now built in.
OneDrive personal and business use this fine, so can others, and then they all behave consistently with similar looking icons and affordances, whichever sync providers the users use.
Like many things HN devs complain about, devs forget they are not the main character, the user is.
This experience convergence is fantastic for users.
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.
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.
(Though I also agree Apple really does need to clean up its own room before worrying about what third party software is doing.)
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.
The 2TB iCloud Drive costs €10 a month or €120 a year. That is a lot of money over a device's lifetime - about €850 for an average MBP (which on average has a 7 year lifespan). And Apple users really feel the pressure to use these more expensive iCloud Drive plans. Unless there is a competing service targeting the same price point (and even a slightly lower one with an annual subscription).
So it makes clear business sense to kill the competition. Every other explanation is just a little bit more contrived than the straightforward business case.
It's a shame that the software has gone backwards in this regard...
> Photos Library isn’t supported on Dropbox for macOS.
And links to this Apple support page [0]. That says:
> And to avoid possible data loss, don't store your library [...] on a device shared over your network or the internet, including over a cloud-based storage service.
So both don't explicitly say it's blocked, just "not supported". What does that even mean? That it won't work at all?
Edit: not sync maybe, but Google Drive for Mac will ingest your Photos from your Mac. Is that synching? Not sure.
If I delete from Photos on Mac they disappear in Google Drive. So shrug.
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.
There is (still) room for competition in this space.
[0]: https://docs.nextcloud.com/desktop/latest/architecture.html#...
I worked NextCloud into my setup locally though. I don’t love its syncing capabilities, but you can get around those if you set up SyncThing folders as external storage. That way you get the benefits of NextCloud (the customizable interface) while getting the fast syncing speeds of SyncThing.
(an unofficial Dropbox client)
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.
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.
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.
Anyway, symlinks in Dropbox were banned years ago. So now Dropbox contains the real directories, and I have symlinks in my home directory. I don’t see how this could go wrong. Also, this is how Dropbox implements their own Computer backup feature.
If you use Nix it's really easy to setup: https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/nixos/...
:)
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
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.
Yep I think Backblaze for backup paired with SyncThing for syncing is probably about as good as it gets. Admittedly my needs for syncing aren't crazy but it's worked well for me.
And Syncthing repeatedly and very explicitly warns that it is not a backup system, and you should have a separate backup running as well.
"Run it on your desktop computers and synchronize them with your server for backup."
For those who don't mind a little extra work (I argue Backblaze is almost no work using their Web UI), syncthing is a really great solution.
Examples: my likes on Twitter, highlights on the web (highlight something, right click "Import to Readwise", it downloads into Emacs via syncthing), calendar events, etc. I'm always collecting stuff that I can reference later without much effort after the initial setup. It just works.
It makes more sense if it’s combined with for example wireguard
Much of it is that it's a truly distributed system, so each computer you connect is untrusted - it doesn't fit well with use-cases of people migrating from Dropbox. It can be made to work, without all that much trouble, but it's based on a very different set of assumptions and it shows.
(I say this as a mostly very happy user of it, and I do recommend it. But you're not going to be successful in migrating your non-tech-enthusiast friends or family)
Syncthing might work for some but it’s not a drop-in replacement for Dropbox at all, you have to come up with your own cloud storage. I tried it for a couple of months but I found it a bit confusing and unpredictable. Felt like I could easily permanently lose data by messing with the config when my brain isn’t 100%. The peace of mind just wasn’t there for me. It felt like a cluster of footguns.
Do we know anything about trustworthiness/security audits/etc? Would just like to get a general feeling of trust, especially since I haven't heard of it before
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.
For example let’s say you want to sync all of ~/Movies, could you hardlink ~/Movies into ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/Movies and it would work?
I don’t use Dropbox so I don’t know, but maybe someone knows?
Anyway, I stopped using Dropbox long ago.
Edit: Parent is talking about directory hardlinks, so no.
God I hate this particular headlining strategy. Can't use any negative words whatsoever. Always have to pretend it's just "a change". But new features are always given top billing on the headline. So now I just assume any vaguely worded headline is to be interpreted in the worst possible light.
There was no official File Provider API or API to show sync icons in Finder when Dropbox started. You use FSEvents/kqueue to monitor filesystem changes and do whatever. Some Finder hacks were required to display sync icons. Then official APIs were unveiled, with restrictions.
Given that Dropbox competitors still work outside ~/Library just fine on macOS 13, I’d say it’s Dropbox choosing a restricted API for whatever reason (easier development?).
But that was a great feature - I used to keep all files on a desktop and sync client files locally and quickly as my work needed.
Has anyone else encountered this?
It's E2E encrypted or they have full access and make use of it, simple as that.
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.
It sounds like that should be fixed instead no?
Having said that, I use icloud as well, together with syncthing.
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).
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.
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).
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.
I may be wrong, but when I installed Alfred and disabled Spotlight entirely I could not get Alfred to index applications or files on-disk.
Thanks for the reminder about Quicksilver. For some reason I thought it was no longer active and I’m glad to be wrong.
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/) 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.
> 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
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"?
Which I honestly hate and won't touch anyway. So this is mostly just pushing me to finally leave Dropbox completely.
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.
As of 2016, dropbox started to intercept calls to open/move/delete files at the kernel level – 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.
(Unless I’ve reversed link_name and target)
ln -s ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox
(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).
We've been moving our solutions away from Dropbox.
(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.)