How are you dealing with the CloudStorage problem?

andrewparker1979 wrote:

Hi all, like many Mac users, I have struggled with Dropbox since the introduction of OS12.3 back in March. Regardless, I have persevered, anticipating a long awaited solution to the online/offline issue that has resulted in 8 months of pain.

It now seems like the "fix" is actually going to render Dropbox completely useless for our organisation. 

For context, I run a studio of around 20 people, all working remotely. We use many applications that link to assets using absolute paths. Because of this we all have our Dropbox located at Macintosh HD > Users > Shared > Studio Dropbox. When a link is created to an asset (InDesign linking to an image for example), it doesn't matter whose Mac that is done on, open the same file on any machine and the link is the same. Crucially the user account of an individuals Mac never comes into play.

It's obviously incredibly frustrating to learn that Apple will now stipulate that the Dropbox folder must reside in a users CloudStorage folder, meaning that the above is completely impossible.

My worry is that it leaves our practice with no option, MacOS is no longer suitable for our needs. As a Mac user of 30 years, it's really quite astounding how something can go from being the perfect solution, to useless, so quickly.

So, how are you dealing with it?

Dropbox is third party—if in doubt search the developers website or contact their: Support/Help/FAQ/Known issues/compatibility/updates/uninstaller

Contact a third-party vendor - Apple Support

Contact a third-party vendor - Apple Support

You can submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

We adapt and overcome. We change our workflows. We rethink things. We seek alternative solutions.

These forums are staffed by volunteers who are Apple customers. Apple doesn't take customer feedback from these forums.

But I doubt an Adobe feature such as links was much of a concern for Apple. This is more of an Adobe problem that needs to be fixed. I've run into this before in the corporate world. Moving network shares to new systems, etc. would break Adobe embedded links. Sadly, Adobe doesn't have an easy way to fix links across thousands of files, you need to edit every single one of them to correct the links. Using links that are not relative makes the problem worse. We solved the problem by going with a digital asset vendor cloud. One that specialized in cloud based asset management. It took a few months to upload all the assets from network shares to the vendors cloud. Importing them in size limited batches and then organizing the files within the system. Another solution might be to switch from DropBox to an Adobe Cloud storage solution. You'll need to start looking for a solution. We used Acquia DAM.

andrewparker1979 wrote:

It's obviously incredibly frustrating to learn that Apple will now stipulate that the Dropbox folder must reside in a users CloudStorage folder, meaning that the above is completely impossible.

Is that what DropBox is telling you?

My worry is that it leaves our practice with no option, MacOS is no longer suitable for our needs. As a Mac user of 30 years, it's really quite astounding how something can go from being the perfect solution, to useless, so quickly.

It sounds like what is happening is that DropBox is trying to implement Apple's new File Provider Extension. There is nothing wrong with that. But that is not a dictate from Apple. That is DropBox choosing to use Apple's API instead of their own mechanism.

Have you tried using symbolic links? It isn't a good idea to try hack up internals with symbolic links. But if you just need a stable path that is identical across systems for some other tool to use, it seems like it would work.

I have seen several similar complaints, not necessarily about DropBox. I'm afraid there is no good answer for you. The world is changing. You don't have the option to avoid changing with it. Even if you switched to Linux or Windows, it will catch up with you. You're literally one phishing e-mail away from losing your company to a ransomware hacker. Does DropBox still provide access to old versions? That's better than traditional file servers.

I suggest contacting Adobe to see if they have any kind of collaborative solution. If not them, look for some kind of document collaboration service like Atlassian Confluence.

Hi there,

I have got the same Issue (even in my company with 6+ workers).

Thanks @ everyone for all their ideas, just as a quick feedback:

Adobe Solutions won't work as they're not streaming files but storing on internal drives. Unless Adobe Files are now

Symlinks won't work because Adobe Apps can't resolve them.

Other Cloud Storages (e.g. Lucidlink) require alltime online-access.

DAM just causes too much organisation and overhead at our scale.

Not sure who i should blame now 😄