Dropbox drops external-drive sync on macOS, stranding terabyte archives
February 2023
Tied to Apple's File Provider requirements, Dropbox announced in 2023 that its Mac client could no longer sync to or store the Dropbox folder on an external drive, forcing all content onto the boot volume and breaking workflows built on large external archives.
What happened
In February 2023, Dropbox confirmed that, as part of its move to Apple's File Provider framework, its macOS client would no longer support keeping the Dropbox folder on an external drive. Apple's File Provider API requires synced content to live under ~/Library/CloudStorage on the system (boot) volume, leaving no supported way to point Dropbox at external storage.
For many users this was a breaking change rather than a minor inconvenience. People who relied on Dropbox to sync large libraries — photographers, video editors, and others with multi-terabyte archives — had deliberately kept the Dropbox folder on a large external drive precisely because the content did not fit, or did not belong, on their Mac's internal SSD. With external-drive support removed, those users faced moving everything onto the boot volume (often impossible on space grounds) or abandoning the workflow.
Impact
The removal effectively stranded users whose entire reason for using Dropbox was to sync data too large for their internal drive, with no equivalent replacement. It became a prominent example in the argument that Dropbox's platform-driven engineering changes repeatedly degraded real-world reliability for power users, and pushed some heavy users toward alternatives that still supported external or arbitrary folder locations.