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I had a hard time downloading large amounts of data from a link that was shared with me.
Recently i had to download large amounts of data from a public shared link to my desktop and hence i was wrapped around by chain of problems and had to refer to numerous forums to solve a basic issue.
1. Dropbox wont allow a user a download GB's of data in one go from a public link which is understandable.
I subscribed to a premium tier of Dropbox to copy data from the public link to my Dropbox account
Upon giving the command to copy roughly 80Gb of data, Dropbox DID NOT SHOW THE STATUS of file transfer. How many GB's were to be transferred ? , how much it would take ?, transfer speed etc. IS IT EVEN COPYING ?NOTHING.
The only confirmation i get is upon completion of the transfer after an unknown amount of and Dropbox opens a new tab showing my account.
I HAD TO MANUALLY TRANSFER dozens of sub folders individually in order to visually confirm the file transfer.
Dropbox loves to keep the user in the dark while transferring/syncing data. My transfer could take an hour, two maybe a day. I would have no way of knowing.
2. WHY does Dropbox have to create a COPY of the data that is ALREADY MADE OFFLINE, if I have to copy data to an external drive ?. Makes no sense
Only solution was to MOVE the Dropbox folder from PC to an relatively empty drive that could afford to duplicate my 100GB data or directly to an external drive. AGAIN, i have no clue about the rate of transfer, status of transfer etc.
Using Dropbox is EXTREMELY IMPRACTICAL if your work entails dealing with swaths of data.
Given that Dropbox has subscription tiers of 2TB and 3TB, i would assume they have a practical approach of dealing with **bleep**ing 3TBs of data.
Dropbox should lower its services to deal with a few hundred GBs at the max if it cant provide reasonable measures for users to manage their data.
2 Replies
- Nancy
Dropbox Community Moderator
Thanks for your post, hoji11.
To clarify, you received a shared link to download files from and not a link to a file transfer, correct?
In general, if you copy files over to your Dropbox account, and you have the desktop app installed, then this will also require that you have enough hard drive space on your computer for them to sync locally.
Can you clarify though what you mean when asking why Dropbox creates a copy of the offline files, if you have to copy them over to your external drive?
If you copied the files over from the shared link to your Dropbox account, then you should be able to find one copy of these files within your local Dropbox folder (whether it’s saved on your internal drive, or an external one).
Let me know, if I’ve misunderstood something and we'll check this further.
DF-DropboxCommunity Manager
hoji11 just wanted to follow up to see if you're still having this issue. If so, would you mind providing a little more info via Nancy's questions?
