A year or two ago an external hard drive of mine stopped working and the GBs of family photographs on it were now inaccessible. I paid a significant amount of money to get the data recovered and decided to get a subscription to Dropbox. I piled all such data into my Dropbox folders and thought that was all OK.
I recently ran a scan on my laptop hard drive and found that the Dropbox folders on my laptop were consuming about as much disk space as I was paying for to dropbox.com. I then learned that a feature called 'Selective Sync' was active against all of those Dropbox folders on my laptop. I received advice, though a Dropbox supported forum, that I could delete the files off the laptop and that would free up disk space on my laptop. I followed this advice and the files disappeared off my local Dropbox folders, but also my dropbox.com storage. Fortunately, they provide a recovery function so no data was lost.
I then tried using the Upload function, but found that this would not work, for me, when 3 files or more were nominated. Maybe that's an issue with my laptop, maybe it's an issue with the aggregate volume of data being up loaded, maybe it's something else but the bottom line was that the Upload function was not suitable for my needs.
I then tried another approach. I moved files into my local Dropbox folders and let Selective Sync upload them to dropbox.com. Once uploaded, I then moved them, within dropbox.com, to another folder against which Selective Sync is not operational. Selective Sync then deleted them off my laptop.
So far, so good except that the free space on my laptop did not increase in line with the volume of data deleted. Further investigation revealed that Dropbox maintains a local cache of deleted data on my laptop. Once I followed the instructions for removing that, my free space increased dramatically. And the files uploaded are still in dropbox.com.
Lessons learned;
- only use Selective Sync against folders you need to have synchronised across devices
- if the Upload doesn't work for you, consider trying the approach that worked for me. Start with one file, something you would not miss if it were lost, than scale up to the files & folders you care about.
- use Google to find out how to action the local Dropbox cache.
I recently ran a scan on my laptop hard drive and found that the Dropbox folders on my laptop were consuming about as much disk space as I was paying for to dropbox.com. I then learned that a feature called 'Selective Sync' was active against all of those Dropbox folders on my laptop. I received advice, though a Dropbox supported forum, that I could delete the files off the laptop and that would free up disk space on my laptop. I followed this advice and the files disappeared off my local Dropbox folders, but also my dropbox.com storage. Fortunately, they provide a recovery function so no data was lost.
I then tried using the Upload function, but found that this would not work, for me, when 3 files or more were nominated. Maybe that's an issue with my laptop, maybe it's an issue with the aggregate volume of data being up loaded, maybe it's something else but the bottom line was that the Upload function was not suitable for my needs.
I then tried another approach. I moved files into my local Dropbox folders and let Selective Sync upload them to dropbox.com. Once uploaded, I then moved them, within dropbox.com, to another folder against which Selective Sync is not operational. Selective Sync then deleted them off my laptop.
So far, so good except that the free space on my laptop did not increase in line with the volume of data deleted. Further investigation revealed that Dropbox maintains a local cache of deleted data on my laptop. Once I followed the instructions for removing that, my free space increased dramatically. And the files uploaded are still in dropbox.com.
Lessons learned;
- only use Selective Sync against folders you need to have synchronised across devices
- if the Upload doesn't work for you, consider trying the approach that worked for me. Start with one file, something you would not miss if it were lost, than scale up to the files & folders you care about.
- use Google to find out how to action the local Dropbox cache.
Last edited:
. And the discipline of a proper back-up strategy. So paying dropbox an annual fee is something I am willing to do, to avoid the overhead of a DIY approach. And I'm not in a position to question their ability to deliver the service paid for.