Forum Discussion
How can I download the whole contents of my Dropbox?
My Dropbox storage is now full and brimming over and so I wish to now urgently download everything (4tb) to a brand new external hard drive to free up that 4tb storage space for new stuff. Is there a simple, straightforward means to do this without hassle or long waits? Thanks for any advice!
3 Replies
- Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hey Brian Nunn, thanks for posting your question today!
Do you perhaps have the Dropbox desktop app already installed on your computer, which would have synced your data to a local Dropbox folder on your hard drive?
That would be the easiest way to download your files.
If your account is over quota, and you haven't already synced your files, you'd have to delete some files, to bring it under quota, so that the desktop app can sync.
Otherwise, you'd have to download them in batches from our website.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks, Hannah, for the advice there. I do have the Dropbox Desktop app on my Mac. When I click it I see the Dropbox Folder in Finder but very little of my data are stored in the cloud currently. Is it a question of just copying that folder over to the HDD then from there marking everything 'Use Offline'?
Thanks,
N
- Rich
Super User II
Brian Nunn wrote:
Is it a question of just copying that folder over to the HDD then from there marking everything 'Use Offline'?
You would have to mark the files as Available Offline first, wait for them to finish syncing to your local drive, and then copy them to the external drive. If you don't have enough local drive space for this, you would need to do it in smaller batches and then mark the files as Online-only again to reclaim that disk space, then repeat the process for another batch of data.
Another option to look at is the dbxcli command line tool. You might be able to use it to download files from your account directly to your external drive.
