I have a great many reference PDFs that I will be putting in libraries with a note for each one.
I hope to put these in the offline area of an upgraded Dropbox account simply because I need them, but infrequently.
Does anyone have any experience with this? I am hoping that the way it can work is that I open a library and can preview and find a PDF, and only then open it.
Would the whole folder go in that offline area? Would only the internal files folder?
Best, Ted
Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t see how this would be different from normal Dropbox where everything is cached offline. Yes, I think you would want the whole EagleFiler library folder to be in the offline area. Otherwise, I’m not sure how reliable DropDMG would be at downloading the needed files on demand.
Putting the entire folder in Dropbox Premium offline does not produce the behavior I want. To be precise…
I have 500G of PDFS that I will put in maybe 4-5 libraries. I want the files to be off-line. For readers that might not know, Dropbox offers Premium, allowing files to show on the desktop but be stored only off-line. This way I save 500G from my SSD. But when I open a library, every file in that library is downloaded to my disk. Every file, regardless of any library operation or browsing. So unless there is something I don’t know, this is untenable. Shucks.
As far as I can tell, there is no current product called Dropbox Premium. Are you referring to Professional?
It sounds like you want the opposite of the Offline feature. The terminology is a bit confusing because it’s from the point of view of their service, not your Mac. So “offline” doesn’t mean “disconnected from your Mac” like a tape archive; it means “available on your Mac without a network connection.” My understanding is that Offline is a way to force Dropbox to always keep a copy of the files on local storage (offline), rather than only in the cloud (online). This is what regular old Mac Dropbox has always done, and it is the most compatible with EagleFiler and other apps because Dropbox is not intercepting every file access to make files appear present when they’re not.
If you want to not store all the files offline, and only download them from the cloud as needed, that sounds like the Smart Sync feature. However, in this case, it sounds like you are saying that Dropbox is not smart enough to know that EagleFiler is only reading the file metadata when you open the library, and it’s taking this as a signal to fully download the files. Perhaps I can figure out what metadata is triggering the behavior and add an option to have EagleFiler not read it. This would enable you to only download to your Mac the files that you are actually viewing.
I apologize Michael for being imprecise. I know it cost you effort to decode.
Yes, Dropbox Professional. They offer the service that regular drop box used to call ‘selective sync’ and possibly still does. I don’t know if the behavior is identical. And yes, it seems that DB must download the files from the DB cloud to my SSD to allow EF to read the metadata.
If I find a solution that works, I will advise.
They still have Selective Sync, but it’s not the same thing: