Turn automated file deletion into "Make online-only" by default

[jamdalla]

Hello,

I use security cameras for research. The cameras are set up to save video recordings directly onto a PC (Windows 11) on the same local network. The folder where videos are saved is inside my Dropbox folder, and the desktop Dropbox client syncs automatically. Videos are therefore automatically uploaded to Dropbox once each file finishes being recorded. This works great.

The issue I am having is related to the capacity of the local hard drive. The security camera management software is set to automatically delete the oldest videos whenever it runs out of storage space, so that it has somewhere to save new videos. This causes these oldest videos to be deleted not only from my local drive, but also from the Dropbox account (Dropbox for Business). I would like to configure Dropbox to instead treat this automated deletion the same as if I used the "Make online-only" option on desktop, i.e. allow the local videos to be deleted as needed by the camera management software, but retain all backups in the online Dropbox.

Is this possible? I'd like to be able to do this while simultaneously retaining as much recent video on the local drive as possible, because we often work with these local video files. This means that making older videos online-only in advance is not really the answer I'm looking for.

Thank you!

[Walter · Accepted solution]

Hey there @jamdalla, thanks for using Dropbox and welcome to the Community!
 

I'm afraid this is not possible at this time with Dropbox. You'd need to manually set those files to be online only when needed to free up hard drive space on your computer(s). 

I'll leave this thread open in case there's a user who can offer something else or a walk-around etc. 

I hope this helps!

[Rich]

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@jamdalla wrote:

I would like to configure Dropbox to instead treat this automated deletion the same as if I used the "Make online-only" option on desktop ... Is this possible?

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No, that's not possible. Dropbox doesn't have an option to change the behavior of deleted files, and there's no way to programmatically set files online or offline.

[jamdalla]

OK, thanks for the useful reply!