Tell HN: Apple quit allowing syncing Photos and FinalCut to cloud-based storage
For years, I've kept my 286GB Photos library backed up via Dropbox. But as of MacOS 12.5, this has been disallowed, per Apple's policy.
Here's Dropbox's writeup, see the table entry "Some types of files aren't supported on Dropbox for macOS."
https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes
Attempting to open my Photos library results in the following error:
The library could not be opened. Main Dropbox 2.photoslibrary” is in Dropbox, and needs to be moved to a folder on your Mac to open.
I can't test it at the moment, but perhaps there's a clever way to symlink around the problem? Unfortunately there’s no symlinking as Dropbox disabled support for external symlinks quite a few years ago. This makes Dropbox inconvenient for backups as you need to move the real directories into Dropbox and put symlinks in their original locations. This latest change was the final straw for me. Apple is trying to force users into iCloud and Dropbox has no option other than to comply. Preventing third-party cloud storage providers from syncing the Photos library seems like anti-competitive behaviour to me, but if there is a lawsuit here it’s years off. I’ve since moved to using B2 and rclone to back up key directories on my machine. This is cheaper than Dropbox (for my usage, ymmv) and I can back up whatever I want without having to jump through any hoops. Of course, not so good if you want to sync stuff between machines. But it works well for backup. They (Apple) have done something new in Ventura, macOS 13; the Dropbox folder is under a new sub-folder at $HOME/Library/CloudStorage. Seems to be a new VFS API, in effect a standardization of proprietary cloud and storage implementations that Dropbox, OneDrive etc have previously had to implement within their apps. I can imagine reasons for this; by going through a high level macOS API, the OS could provision things like background (or "Power Nap") network access and synchronization, which currently isn't possible for third-party programmers to access. So it's likely not exactly APFS as we know it. If Photos was using snapshots or something similar then that could have weird interactions with the notion of remote synchronization. I'm speculating. It seems this happens if you download the Dropbox for MacOS native Apple Silicon version. The Intel agent still seems to keep files in the original location.