Personal folders & files to be available on one device only

[London22]

Hi. I have one Dropbox account and each of my laptops (1 at home two at work) have Office 365. My personal files (created at home) are available on my work laptops. I need to make these files to be accessible ONLY at home. How can I isolate them please?

Thanks,

Peter.

[Nancy]

Hi @London22! Hope you’re doing well, and Happy New Year.

If you have these files in a folder, and you don’t want them to show on your work computers at all, you can use selective sync on each one of your work devices, and remove them from there (this won’t affect the files showing on your home computer, and the files will be normally accessible via your web account). 

If you need more help though, give me a nudge.

[London22]

Thanks Nancy, and a Happy New Year to you - from Alderney

I'll give this a go when I'm in work tomorrow.

Peter.

[London22]

I have tried to find "Selective sync" on my work laptops, without success.

I selected the personal folder on my work laptop explorer, right clicked and from the drop-down menu I selected Dropbox. I then tried sub menus Manage Access and Show more options, but I could not find Selective sync.

Could you please advise how I can find this option?

Thank you,

Peter (London22)

[Rich]

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@London22 wrote:

I selected the personal folder on my work laptop explorer, right clicked and from the drop-down menu I selected Dropbox.

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Refer to the instructions that Nancy linked to. They describe in detail how to access Preferences and your Selective Sync settings, or you can use this article on how to access Preferences itself.

Basically, you don't click (or right-click) on your Dropbox folder. You need to click on the Dropbox application icon in your system tray (Windows) or menu bar (Mac), in order to access Preferences.

[London22]

Thanks Rich. I'm nearly there.

I found my way to 'Preferences' / 'Sync' / and 'Selective Sync'. I clicked on 'Select Folders'.

There were two tick boxes, 'Select all' and 'Select folders'. I clicked the latter.

There was nothing (like a 'browse' button) I could use to select the two folders that I need to remove from my work laptop. (I'm doing this on my work laptop).

Any clue as to what I can do next?

Appreciated. Peter.

[Hannah]

Hey @London22, while you can't search for a specific folder name, you should be able to navigate to those folders from that box, as long as you know their location.

[London22]

Sorry Hannah, I can't see anyway I can navigate to the folders which are in a known location, i.e on the explorer tree of my hard drive, AND on the Dropbox tree. My understanding is I need to take them from the hard drive. I have tried copying the folders in order to paste into the box, with no success, and there is no browse or import facility in the box.

Further help much appreciated.

[Rich]

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@London22 wrote:

I can't see anyway I can navigate to the folders ... My understanding is I need to take them from the hard drive. I have tried copying the folders in order to paste into the box ...

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That's not how it's done. When you have the Selective Sync window open, you can just check and uncheck the folders that you want to sync. In this screenshot, all of the folders are unchecked so they will not sync to that computer. They will only exist in my account online. If I were to check any of the folders and click Update, they would start to sync down to that computer.