Dropbox took away all the GBs I had earned by referring other users. Why is that?

Thanks for joining our Community, pehirsch51! 

Can you go to this page and send me a screenshot of what you see? 

Do you remember how much Dropbox space you had in total, before your referrals were removed? 

We’ll take it from there.

I had a total of 17 GB; now it's 2 GB.  

BTW, I still recommend Dropbox to other users.  

Thank you for checking into this, Nancy. 

I have not gone over 17 GB because DB has not let me do so. I've taken a number of things out of DB because of all the warnings I have gotten today. 

Thanks for all the screenshots! If you go here, can you see what’s taking up the extra space on your Dropbox account? 

For example, in some cases, Dropbox backup may have been accidentally enabled and there are files using up Dropbox storage. You can also double check this here and delete them, if need be.

Let me know what you find.

pehirsch51 wrote:

I have not gone over 17 GB because DB has not let me do so

You have - because thats exactly what it says. 

What can happen, other than Backups, is that if you are in a share they can continue to add files to the folder which continues to take up your space, even if its already full.

Same thing has happened to me.  I pay for the 2TB plan, and several people over many years have accepted and signed up through my invite.  Yet I only have 2TB of storage.  It seems my storage has gone back down or the referral storage is gone. 

jjwithers wrote:

I pay for the 2TB plan, and several people over many years have accepted and signed up through my invite. Yet I only have 2TB of storage.

Look at your Plan page. How much space does it say you have, exactly? It should look like this:

You can see here that mine says 3.07 TB. That's 3 TB for the Professional/Essentials plan, and .07 TB for my bonus space that I've earned. I have all 32 referrals completed, worth 1 GB each (32 GB), plus other bonus space I've earned for a total of 70 GB.

You might think by looking at 3.07 TB that my bonus space is gone, but when you're on a paid plan it actually accounts for a very small percentage of your total space. In my case, about 2%.

The only time referral space is removed is when it's earned in an untrustworthy manner (gaming the referral system, for instance). Other types of bonus space often has a time limit before it expires. Beyond that, Dropbox doesn't remove space earned through referrals.

You can see a list of all of your earned space, and whether or not it's expired, on your Referrals page.