Needless to say, if Dropbox offers to back up your Mac desktop, documents, and downloads folder, don’t do it. I had to reinstall Catalina to make it work, but everything in my user folders was intact and functional.

Possibly I could have tracked down every hidden cached reference to that script, but it wasn’t worth the effort, so I fixed the problem by drastic means: I removed the whole Catalina system from my new disk, and restored it again from a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of the old disk. It turned out that Dropbox had moved all my Desktop files into the Dropbox folder, leaving symlinks behind, and that any script that I ran that referred to the POSIX path of the applet itself now used a path that had parentheses in it - and the first parenthesis was the “unexpected token.”Īfter I got rid of the Dropbox backup system and moved the backed-up files back to my desktop, most of them worked, but one kept giving a “not authorized to send Apple events to the Finder” error, no matter how many permissions I gave it.

If I ran a script from the desktop, the problem occurred with the first line that ran a shell script that (for example) copied a file stored inside the applet that line produced an “Unexpected token near position 0” error (or something similar I’m writing from memory). Thinking this backup might be a good idea, and not reading the fine print, I clicked Yes, and then a lot of my scripts stopped working. Apparently this system is in beta, and is offered only some setups, and my new disk triggered the offer when Dropbox recognized that I was using a new disk and required me to log in and set up Dropbox on the disk. After transferring my Catalina system to a replacement SSD, Dropbox offered to setup a new system that backs up my Desktop, Documents, and Downloads folder.

How to use dropbox mac