Need help removing dropbox

[jimand]

Situation:

- My mother had a file shared with her through dropbox several years ago so she created an account. 

- Now she continuously gets dropbox emails saying her storage is full

- I see a folder on her Windows 7 PC named Dropbox with what looks like is her personal files that should be on her computer and nothing to do with dropbox

- Looking at her config through the web, she does not have backup turned on

- She had an email comment that said "syncing stopped", but I see nothing about syncing in the config stuff. We have no idea why anything is going to dropbox. It even appeared to have recent email attachments or downloads

- She is elderly, this is very confusing to her, and she calls me constantly when she gets notices to upgrade out of fear she is financially delinquent. This is causing significant stress

I want to get her completely out of dropbox without her losing any of her personal files.

Im trying to install the app to see if I can do something there, but the installer has just been showing dancing blue squares for the past 2 hours

Neither of us are tech savy or dropbox knowledgeable. There is no reason she needs dropbox and I need to get rid of it for her asap.

I cannot find a way to communicate directly with dropbox support

I'd really appreciate any advise or pointers.

Thank you for your time

[Jay]

Hi @jimand, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you confirm the exact quota usage according to this page?

Is it possible that there are files in shared folders which could be taking up quota?

This will help me to assist further!

[jimand]

Thank you for the reply Jay.

According to that page, she is using 4.3GB of 4.25GB where 2.8 are regular and 1.5 are shared.

I guess there are shared folders. We have no idea why she started using the dropbox space, Im not sure where to look. I know the folders I see under here xxx/Dropbox folder on the PC are a subset of what I see on dropbox.com.

I cannot get the app to install, it just spins while seting up

[Jay]

As there are shared folders, it's possible that other users are adding more files into those folders, which will also take up space on your account. 

Windows 7 is no longer supported for the Dropbox desktop application, so it wouldn't be possible to have it working normally on that OS. 

If you don't need the files in the shared folders, you could leave the shared folder (which is temporary) or permanently remove your access to them.

[jimand · Accepted solution]

I did find the cause of her problem...

She had a username/dropbox/download folder that contained all her downloads from the past several years. Checking her browser settings, the download directory was specifying that username/dropbox/download folder. When I changed the config to use username/download, it didnt update the directory but stayed with username/dropbox/download. Somehow the two folders were the same. I then created a new folder called username/Download2. When I configured the browser to use that new local folder for downloads, it stuck instead of using a dropbox folder. Afterwards I deleted everything from the dropbox downloads folder and storage space used is now basically 0.

I'm not sure if that made sense, or how her computer got setup like that, but all is good now.

Thanks again for your input @jay. I'm feeling foolish due to the cause but appreciate your help. Consider this closed

[Jay]

No worries, thanks for keeping me posted.

Enjoy the rest of your week!