Odrive client and Dropbox client file/folder icon overlays/badging conflicting on OS X

When using both the odrive client and the Dropbox client at the same time you may see some funky behavior with Dropbox’s overlays.

This has been noted by a few people on OS X and I am able to reproduce the effect myself.

It seems to be a load ordering issue. In order to actually turn off the extensions for Dropbox you need to do it via their own preferences panel checkbox titled “Enable Finder integration”.

I have noticed that, if you enable odrive’s extensions after Dropbox’s, they both seem to co-exist correctly. To do this, perform the following actions:

  1. Go to “System Preferences”->“Extensions”
  2. Uncheck both Dropbox and odrive
  3. Dropbox will automatically be re-enabled after a few seconds.
  4. Check odrive’s extensions to re-enable

At this point both extensions should be working properly.

Keep in mind that odrive is meant to be a replacement client for Dropbox, so you can always simplify things by ditching the Dropbox client and using odrive. :wink:

This does work, but it is only a temp solution. After a few hours Finder glitches again, requiring the user to repeat the steps.

Seems to be an OS X issue more than an Odrive issue.

Same problem here. This “solution” works just for a period. I had to uninstall odrive to Dropbox AND Google Drive work properly. I was using odrive just for my ACD account.

Yeah, Unfortunately I don’t know why this happens.

We are using the extensions in the Apple prescribed way, so there doesn’t seem like much we can do other than possibly reloading them every so often, but that is not a road I would be comfortable going down… maybe this is why Dropbox auto loads theirs, even when the user disables them?

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Any update on this? Every day I have to disable/enable the extension, it gets really annoying.

We don’t have anything planned for this. We can’t find anything we are doing incorrectly or against Apple’s spec, so there isn’t anything identified for fixing on our side.

What version of OS X are you currently running?

Hi, I’m running 10.11.6

The main reason I would be using the Dropbox client in addition to the odrive one would be to generate Dropbox links. I know that odrive can create similar links, but since most of the people I send those to are familiar with Dropbox, I’d rather stick to the Dropbox links. I can always create them on the Dropbox website, but that requires substantially more effort.

Is there a way to create native (Dropbox, Google Drive) shared links from the odrive client?

Hi @george,

Unfortunately there isn’t a way to do that. Our weblink sharing is meant to standardize/unify the sharing experience across any linked storage that you have:

  • We give you the option to set a password and/or expiration date for free against any storage source (for Dropbox, it’s a Pro feature).
  • We also let you manage all of your shared links from one place.

You don’t need to sign up for an odrive account to view a shared weblink, so I’d imagine it’s all the same to the person you’re sending a link to if the email comes from you.

We’re not precluding you from using the original source’s client/webclient. And we also don’t want to make it more confusing for general odrive users who share with odrive weblinks. It may not be as convenient to continue using the original clients, but at least you can make an informed choice about what you want to do… A little bit more pain on your end to keep using Dropbox sharing, or try using odrive sharing (may require preparing the people you’re sharing with ahead of time… or it might not).

Thanks for your feedback and your use of odrive–we really do appreciate it. I just want to be honest that this feature request probably won’t be something we do since we have a good weblink sharing solution in place already… a solution which matches our belief that everyone should link all their storage to odrive and use its universal storage features instead of continuing with a fragmented/siloed storage experience.

Best,
-Jeff

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I didn’t know that I can use both clients side by side. That is actually wonderful.