The Spooky season has officially arrived and we want to make sure the only fright you get this year comes in the shape of some awesomely dressed trick or treaters rapping, rapping at your door. Weâve noticed a few headaches pop up in the Community over the last year so weâve gone all Frankenstein and built a monstrous list of Storage Nightmares and how to avoid them his Halloween.
Shared Folders are a really great way to share your work and collaborate with others. Theyâre like an inter-dimensional portal that allows you to look directly into someone elseâs content, kind of! While there are so many positives, there is also the risk of a potential storage nightmare by overloading your account with more information than your plan allows.
When someone shares a folder with you, you donât actually get access to their space on Dropbox, instead you get a synced copy of the folder in your own Dropbox. If you donât have enough space left on your plan to fit a shared folder, it will fill your Dropbox quicker than a gang of flesh-hungry zombies swarming around brains and you wonât be able to access any of the files.
There are a couple of ways to get around this. You could always ask the person who sent it to re-send it as âread onlyâ, this wonât require any space in your Dropbox. If you do need âeditingâ access, the folder could be sent via a Shared Link and youâll be able to open the folder on Dropbox.com without taking up any of your own space.
Weâve all been there, once PCs and laptops get a few years old they inevitably develops a couple of Gremlins in the works and need to be replaced. This might be a good time to sell or pass your current machine to a friend or family member. The only problem is, youâve got all of this information saved in your Dropbox and you donât want to lose any of it or allow anyone else to access it. Hereâs a very simple guide to doing this without having to worry about eating after midnight!
So, once you log into Dropbox on another device, you should automatically have access to all of your files. Once youâre sure everything is saved there, you can open up your new device and login to Dropbox.com and check that you have everything you need.
When youâre happy that everything is stored safely in Dropbox, you can then go back to your old laptop and uninstall the desktop app and delete all the Dropbox folders. Itâs a bit like an exorcism, only instead of casting demons aside, youâll be casting unneeded folders aside.
If youâre using Dropbox to save lots of images, you could take a look at your image formatting. JPEG or PNG files are much smaller than bulky files like TIFF or BMP and could save you some very valuable space. Likewise, if youâre using Dropbox to save lots of videos, you could try compressing these files before saving them, this will definitely free up some much needed megabytes.
Community Manager
