Bootcamp on external HD with dropbox?

[NStocks]

Hi,

I have a windows 10 laptop for work and my Mac for study, which means every three days or so I need to rearrange my desk, pack away the windows laptop and get my Mac out. First world problems.

My question is, I believe I can run Windows via bootcamp on an external HD, but, with work we use Dropbox for syncing/sharing/storing all of our files. Can anyone share their experience with running such a setup? My worry is Dropbox doesn't immediately see the external HDD that's running windows and has a panic and deletes stuff?

Ideally I'd just use my Mac and forget the windows laptop but I did the stupid thing and only bought 256GB SSD.

 

[Cycling Asia]

I've got a 256GB usb that I have Windows 10 installed on. I'm able to use this to boot a 2015, 2017, and 2018 MBP. It was an absolute pain to set up though. I had to install bootcamp on the 2015 MBP as it had the largest internal drive and I could install bootcamp. Once I had windows 10 running on the internal drive, I booted into windows and used AOMEI Partition Assistant to copy the Windows 10 installation to the external SSD. The software creates a windows on the go installation.

Once the clone was complete, I was able to boot into Windows 10 on the SSD on the 2015 MBP. Everything worked as expected.

I then got the bootcamp drivers for the 2017 MBP. Eventually I was able to boot into Windows 10 on the 2017 MBP and with the help of external keyboards and mice, I was able to install the 2017 bootcamp drives. Rebooting and everything worked as expected.

The above worked great, and I got a 2018 MBP for work, so I download the bootcamp for the 2018 MBP and after configuring the MBP to allow booting from external media, I was able to boot into windows on the 2018. Again with the help of the external mouse and keyboard, I was able to install the bootcamp drivers. After rebooting, everything worked as expected.

I've also discovered that I can clone the SSD using the macOS disk utility.

I'll finally add that after I have done all of the above, the SSD still had around 120GB free so you could try partitioning it using the AOMEI app and then have an exFAT partition that both macOS and Windows can read and write to.

Edit: one final note... always have backups, because things will likely go wrong and you'll have to reset.

 

[NStocks]

Do you also run dropbox on the external HD? This is something that doesn't seem to be officially supported...

 

[Cycling Asia]

Do you also run dropbox on the external HD? This is something that doesn't seem to be officially supported...

I assume you're referring to dropbox, the cloud storage. If so, I prefer to use mega.nz and I've had no issues with using it in Windows running in different hardware.