Box Sync for Mac: Setting a custom location

tOSU has partnered with the Box cloud storage service. It’s got its virtues, to be sure. Ease of customization is not one of them (sync reliability prior to v4.0.something was sketchy, too, but let’s stay focused). In fact, it feels like Box had to go to real lengths to make it so difficult to do something basic like, oh, choose where your synced files live. I can see the appeal for enterprise management, but those aims could have been achieved without making things so obtuse for end-users.

Box Sync for Mac wants to put your files in your home folder. In fact, when you install it and log in with your tOSU credentials, it automatically creates that location (if non-existent) and starts syncing there.

What if you…

• Don’t have enough space in that location?
• Have an SSD and would like to minimize extraneous writes?
• Roaming profile?
• Roaming + offline files?

The list goes on. Lots of situations, to be sure, where this default behavior is pathological.

Let’s say you want Box to sync to a different location. Let’s call it /Volumes/Drive1/syncme/.

• With many other cloud sync clients, you can set a custom location in the program’s Preferences. With Box, not so.
• With other cloud services you could create a symlink. As of this posting, Box can’t handle symlinks.

What can you do with Box Sync? Let’s take a ride…

Right-click the b icon in the taskbar and choose Quit.

Open Activity Monitor.

Kill the Box Sync and Box Sync Monitor processes, if they’re running. Kill Box Edit, too, if you see it.

Go to ~/Applications and trash Box Sync.

Rename your Box Sync folder (to any other name), or delete it if you’re 1000% confident those files are safe somewhere else.

Delete these locations:

~/Library/Application Support/Box/Box Sync/
~/Box Sync/ (remember, this won’t exist if you’ve renamed it or deleted it as suggested above)
~/Library/Logs/Box/Box Sync/

Was Box Edit running? You’ll want to delete that, too. Searching for it via Spotlight is expedient enough.

Empty your trash. Reboot.

Log in.

Open a text editor — I’m partial to TextWrangler on the Mac — and paste this:

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>SyncRootFolder</key>
<string>/Volumes/Drive1/syncme/</string>
</dict>
</plist>

… except you’re going to specify your custom location in place of /Volumes/Drive1/syncme/.
Save the file in /Library/Preferences/ , (note that this is the Library folder at the root of your boot hard drive, not the Library folder in your user profile), naming it com.box.sync.plist . Make sure you’re saving the file as plain text, and that your editor doesn’t paste on an extension like ‘.txt’ — the filename must be exact.

Now, download the latest Box Sync for Mac from http://www.box.com/sync4mac/. Start the installer. Pray.

Incidentally, it’s hard to believe that this is really the only possible method — with all the Box processes stopped, you should be able to create the .plist file, maybe trash the folders above, and restart Box Sync. The method above is sure-fire, at least.

Bon chance!

Note that, if you’re on the Windows side, you apparently have to make registry edits to set a custom location. See this Box help article. Similar to the Mac, you have to set a custom configuration prior to installing/running Box Sync.

But wait, there’s more! The registry location is under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, which is a computer-specific, rather than user-specific, location. That means that it’s harder to set user-unique sync locations, and then the setting for that location doesn’t roam with the user (as it would under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, assuming roaming profiles).