Sharing a single Dropbox between multiple accounts on one Mac - possible?

Question

This seems like it should be easy, but...

My partner and I use a single Dropbox.com account to keep all of our joint projects synced up between our computers - and this has been working great for years. We've now added a MacBook Air to the mix, and we each have accounts on it and can grab it and go when we need to do some remote work.

I've been trying to get the Dropbox synced to the Air - but I want to have it in the "Shared" directory so that we both can access it - it shouldn't matter who is logged in. This doesn't seem to be working.

I can located the Dropbox in the shared directory fine - but when I change the user who is logged in that user has no permissions to sync the Dropbox or access the files.

I can get it to work if I create a separate ~/Dropbox folder for each user, but this ends up with 50GB duplicated twice over if the entire Dropbox syncs - a particularly ridiculous waste of space on an SSD.

Any ideas how to make this sharing work????

Answer 1

One method I've used with some success is to set the permissions on the folder to allow multiple user accounts to "Read & Write" to the /Users/Shared/Dropbox/ folder.

You can do this by:

• Going to the Get Info (Cmd+i) window on the /Users/Shared/Dropbox folder
• Unlocking to edit permissions
• Clicking on the "+" icon to add another user account and setting the "Privilege" to "Read & Write"
• Click on the gear triangle dropdown to the left of the lock icon, choose "Apply to enclosed items..." and confirm that you wish to do this (irreversible) change

I'm not very sure, but you may still have some permission related issues if you get files from another Mac's user account. That may require assigning ownership correctly.

Answer 2

While not a complete solution, you can choose which dropbox folders to sync on your second account, thus reducing the amount of HDD space required and unnecessary duplicate files.

Answer 3

My first thought would be to partition the HD (or SSD). One partition would have OS X, apps, user folders, etc., and the second would have only the Dropbox folder. Select the icon for the partition and check Ignore Permissions, and both users should have access. However, I've had volumes where I've checked Ignore Permissions revert so other users can't access this, but it's a quick fix.

Answer 4

You can use umask to set up restriction to file permission. Default setting is 022 so file mask is 644 (or 755 for dirs). Simple way is to set umask 002 (in file /etc/profile or some others), but this leads to security issue.

Oops, this is answer on the file permission problem when 2 users work under one Dropbox account on the same PC.

And the second one remark Mac users must edit umask in files /etc/launchd-user.conf or /etc/launchd.conf (see http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2202 for details)