Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Backing up and syncing from external HD to the Dropbox folder issues
Hello,
I am getting mixed information from the Dropbox helpdesk and could use some help.
I’m a photographer. I have 6.5Tb of photos stored on my External Drobo hard drive. I work from that hardd...
Danman wrote:
Ok, so are you saying that I could sync my files from my external drive to dropbox and use smart sync to not let them be backed up on my computer. But they will remain on my external drive?
No. Unless you move the Dropbox folder to your external drive, which isn't suggested, there's no way to sync files with your external drive.
What I was saying is that if the Dropbox folder is on your laptop, and you use Selective Sync on a folder, it will be removed from the Dropbox folder and not your external drive. Dropbox can only interact with the Dropbox folder.
In this scenario with Dropbox on your laptop and your files on the external drive, any folders you want stored on Dropbox would need to be MANUALLY copied to the Dropbox folder, allowed to sync completely, and then you could remove them from the Dropbox folder using Selective Sync so they only remain online. Again, this is a MANUAL process where you will need to be vigilant about copying files to and from Dropbox as needed so everything is up to date.
Again, Dropbox will not do what you want it to do with your configuration. It's simply not designed for it. No cloud storage service that I know of will work the way you want it to.
Do you have a Mac? I don't remember to do as often as I should, but backing up the external hard drive to time machine is something I do. Wonder if that may work for you? I have also used backblaze in the past; takes days and days to back up everything, but once it does, then updating while your hard drive is plugged in shouldn't take too long. For the rest of your computer, it just runs all the time in the background.
Thanks for bringing this up. I have tons of space on dropbox, but apparently will need another option :(.
Kathy
I have the same problem; also a photographer, athough only semi-professional, so my storage need is smaller - around 2TB. I have just come across Boxifier which looks like it will address this problem of backing up data from ext HDs onto Dropbox, but is not yet available for Macs (they say will be soon). Don't quite understand what Kathy said about 'backing up an ext HD 'to' Time Machine; the point of Time Machine is that it backs up TO an ext HD - it is not for offline storage., so far as I am aware. She mentioned Backblaze - but seems not to use it? Why?
