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

Forum Discussion

Rongal's avatar
Rongal
Explorer | Level 3
2 months ago
Solved

How to delete files from an external drive backup?

Device (WINDOWS 11 ON PC) Question or Issue IN DROPBOX I HAVE A BACKUP OF AN EXTERNAL DRIVE THAT WAS CONNECTED TO AN  (OLD) NON-EXISTING PC .  I WANT TO DELETE SELECTED DIRECTORIES FROM THE DROP...
Delete
desktop
Dropbox Backup
windows
  • Megan's avatar
    Megan
    2 months ago

    Hi there, Rongal!

    You're correct. I know this might not be exactly what you're looking for, however you can always download your backup to another device or drive, and then remove what you want before adding it back to your account. 

    Let me know if you have any other questions! 

Rich's avatar
Rich
Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
2 months ago
Rongal wrote:

I want to delete selected directories from the Dropbox backup.  How can i delete them and retrieve Dropbox backup memory space?

I may be wrong as I don't use that feature very often, but I don't think that's possible. You can delete the entire backup, but you can't delete selected files or folders within a backup when the original computer is no longer backing up the content.

Rongal's avatar
Rongal
Explorer | Level 3
2 months ago

Thanks for your response.  What you suggest seems to be counterproductive - the goal of the backup is to allow for recovery and maintaining of files on a media that has become inoperative or unavailable.  I haven't tried to delete the entire backup of my external drive, but that would cause a complete loss of everything that is on it.
The alternative is to download the entire backup (all ~200GB of it!) to my current PC, then delete the original backup.  Is that what is actually suggested?

 

  • Megan's avatar
    Megan
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    2 months ago

    Hi there, Rongal!

    You're correct. I know this might not be exactly what you're looking for, however you can always download your backup to another device or drive, and then remove what you want before adding it back to your account. 

    Let me know if you have any other questions! 

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!