macOS Monterey has switched Box Drive dragging from copy to move

After upgrading to Monterey, Box Drive has made a significant change in behavior where dragging a file from Box Drive to the local filesystem moves the file, rather than the previous behavior of copying the file. It will still copy if you're dragging the file to removable media, but not the local Mac drive.

Anyone know of a way to alter this behavior back to the previous?

It causes three fairly significant issues.

One, if someone needs a local copy of a file for travel, offline, whatever, now it's removed from Box and no one else can access it if they had a permission level on the file that allows for its removal. Yes, you can hold Option while dragging to get it to revert to copying, but is everyone in the company going to be trained and remember to do that every time?

Second, if someone forgets to hold Option while dragging even one time, that file has now moved from Box to local and its object ID is lost. When they realize the mistake and put the file back, it will gain a new ID. This means every single system, document, bookmark, etc. that pointed to the previous URL of the object is now broken.

Third, in line with the above, even one simple instance of someone forgetting to drag with Option held down will result in the prior object and its entire version history being trashed. We have a Box Enterprise plan with unlimited version history, and we sometimes need those versions for undoing mistakes that may have occurred a large number of versions prior. Well, those are all gone now, and it means every user mistake will now require a Box admin getting into the trash to find the original object to restore, every single time any employee does this.

WAX LTD

May 11, 2022 06:05

100% Agree with this post. It’s actually a huge issue for organizations. The potential for unknowingly ruining the file systems, and no one else even realizing it happened, make this a real problem.