Available Offline Expiry

In Dropbox for Windows, the "Make Available Offline" feature allows you to download and access files and folders on your local computer, even if they are originally stored in the cloud. By default, Dropbox doesn't have a specific time frame to automatically switch files back to online-only. However, you can manually set files and folders back to online-only when you no longer need them offline. Here's how you can do it:

1. Open the Dropbox folder on your computer.
2. Locate the folder or file that you want to switch back to online-only.
3. Right-click on the folder or file.
4. In the context menu, select "Smart Sync" (formerly known as "Choose Smart Sync").
5. In the Smart Sync submenu, choose the "Online-only" option.

This process will mark the folder or file as online-only, and it will be removed from your local computer, freeing up storage space. However, the files will still be accessible through your Dropbox account and will sync back to your computer if you access them again in the future.

It's important to note that the Smart Sync feature is available only to Dropbox Plus, Professional, and Business users. If you have a Dropbox Basic (free) account, you won't have access to Smart Sync, and files will be stored locally on your computer.

By manually setting files and folders back to online-only when you're done using them, you can control which files are stored locally and which remain online-only, helping you manage your storage space efficiently.

Thanks for the reply Emily.

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Emily84 wrote:

By default, Dropbox doesn't have a specific time frame to automatically switch files back to online-only.

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This is ambiguous to me. Does this mean that Dropbox will not switch files back to online-only automatically? Or does it mean that Dropbox will switch files back to online-only, but the time frame in which it does this is not well defined?

I was working in an offline environment without internet access and was expecting to be able to access some files which I had made “available offline”. Despite appearing under “Manage offline files”, apparently these files couldn’t be opened because there was no internet access, and it said I needed to get online to “re-sync”. This caught me off-guard because I’d expect the files to remain permanently offline, given its name. Granted, I hadn’t accessed those files in a while, but from my experience, offline files do “expire” (ie. become unavailable) after a set time frame, unless you “re-sync”.

Hey hispdtape, sorry to hear about this.

Could you clarify your computer's OS and confirm that those files were indeed available offline and not online only or placeholders (if the app wasn't syncing) when you tried to work on them? 

Were you getting a specific error? Do you maybe have a screenshot of that in hand? 

Any additional information is more than welcome!