Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨‍💻? Find out how to check here.

Forum Discussion

Luix's avatar
Luix
Helpful | Level 6
5 years ago
Solved

Backup, sync, external drives and local backup

Hi.   I want help to see if I'm doing the right thing here. Maybe I'm being dumb and you have a better idea for my problem.  My computer has 500GB of space.  I work on my projects locally a...
Delete
desktop
  • ryan l.8's avatar
    ryan l.8
    5 years ago

    It really depends, it sounds like if anything goes wrong, your most recent work will be on dropbox, and your last sync of the files from your external HDD will be available via your offsite backup.  So for me this sounds like the optimal solution and I wouldn't really change anything unless for whatever reason you feel that in the event of some problem, you want to access your folders from your HDD quickly, rather than wait for the external backup copy.

    You can have the google drive folder located on an external drive, but it can cause some occasional issues if it isn't connected 24/7.  In  my experience it's usually fine, it'll just wait until you plug it in and not do much in between.

Luix's avatar
Luix
Helpful | Level 6
3 years ago

Hi.

 

Interesting moment I get your message, Miraflor9000. I just bought a new 8TB external drive and decided to sync DropBox to it. After a week, it finished last Sunday. It is working okay. Thank you for sharing your experience. I don't know why Dropbox says syncing to External Drives are a problem, it looks fine until now. 

 

Thank you again!

Rich's avatar
Rich
Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
3 years ago
Luix wrote:

I don't know why Dropbox says syncing to External Drives are a problem ...

Because it can be, and HAS BEEN, a problem. Yes, some people have had success, but many other people storing Dropbox on an external drive have lost all of their files as a result of a problem with the drive or it becoming disconnected while Dropbox was running. This is why Dropbox warns against it.

  • Luix's avatar
    Luix
    Helpful | Level 6
    3 years ago

    Thank you, Rich and Miraflor9000.

     

    My problem here was some vendors sent me some video projects in the past via DropBox, so they were all stored in there ONLY. I need to say I was counting on luck until last week. Now I have a physical backup too, and this backup is copied to an AWS server, so I'm kind of safe for now. Hahaha. 

     

    About the power outage issue, you are right again. Good idea! Thank you!

About Delete, edit, and organize

Solve issues with deleting, editing, and organizing files and folders in your Dropbox account with support from the Dropbox Community.

The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!