Turn off hard drive back up

[DigiluxAmsterdam]

Hello, juts tried the new feature hard drive back-up. You can eve choose folders. So I picked my most important folder, my main dj folder with 300gb music. But dropbox is doing  something with that folder, now in my dj program over 600 files are missing. Currently trying to repait this. Although I see the icon from the folder in my on line folder, in my desktop app I can't find the setting to turn this back -up future off. I can find the settings for desktop back up, but this is an external drive.

Online help article says you can pause the back-up. But I want to cancel it, anyone knows how?

Thanks

[Hannah · Accepted solution]

Hey @DigiluxAmsterdam, thanks for reaching out to our Community!

When it comes to the external drive backup, even though there's no specific button, you can just delete the backup folder from Dropbox to stop the backup.

Deleting it in Dropbox will only delete it from there, not your external drive.

Let me know if you have any questions.

[DigiluxAmsterdam]

Thanks!

[Hannah]

Not a problem!

If you have any more questions, make sure to let us know!

[Troy Walton]

My dropbox started automatically backup up my external hard drive (without me asking it to do this).

I cannot find anyway of terminating this backup and it says it will take 2 days to complete.

I don't what dropbox to back up my external hard drive at all - I cannot find where to switch this off?

[Megan]

Hi @Troy Walton, no worries this is why I am here. 

You can find the steps to disable Computer backup right here. 

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to let me know!

[JMH2011]

I am having the same issue.  An external hard drive is trying to backup to Dropbox.  I have gone into preferences and backups and I can't see anything that has to do with my external hard drive. 

[1morecreative]

I have the same issue. Plugged in a 4T G-Drive, Dropbox offers to backup, I said "OK" and now the drive is gone! I cannot see the drive from my MacBook Air to access 5 years of work. Not cool!

[davidxtaylor]

Hi

I need to turn off DropBox backing up my external drive too. I did not ask for it and now my DB account is full.

I am on Win 11

I have followed the instructions and from my taskbar DB icon I go:
Account avatar>Preferences>backups

there I see 'ThisPC', Automatically back up your desktop etc. The box says 'Set up'. Therefore I am not yet set up to sync them.

The 'External Drive Backups' switch is off.

Account avatar>Preferences>Sync

Under the Sync icon (top right) I see Selective sync, and inside the two folders I desire to sync are correctly identified.

In Windows Explorer I see the DB icon at the same level as 'This PC', and if I expand I see the two folders that I DO want to selective sync on DB in the cloud. The external drive is not shown there.

In Windows Explorer I also see the DB icon inside Users/[my id], and if I expand I again see the two folders that I DO want to selective sync on DB in the cloud. The external drive is again not shown there.

Then I go to the browser interface and log in to DB, I am at https://www.dropbox.com/home/. On the left I see 'All files' and there is under it the two folders I desire to selective sync, plus the removable hard drive and I can see many files inside it. From this place there is no apparent way a)to stop the backing up, or b) to remove the external drive's data already being stored in the cloud.

I get flurries of warning about being out of space and invitations to upgrade.

I have done my hardest to read the instructions and follow this thread  so please can someone help me remove the data from the cloud and prevent further attempts to sync this drive.

Any help extremenly appreciated

[Jay]

Hi @davidxtaylor, to disable the external drive backup you need to delete the external drive from the Dropbox site directly.

This won't affect the files in the external drive itself, and will prevent it from being synced again.