Shared folders taking up all my storage - How do I get out of shared folders?

[stoes40toes]

I've run out of storage and its because of others sharing folders with me.  How do I get out of shared folders?

[Rich · Accepted solution]

You definitely have one or more shared folders that are taking up the majority of your space. Go to your Files page and  if you don't see a Members header column, click the Type or Modified column and select Members. Then look for any folder that looks like this:

If you find any, hover your cursor over the folder to make the Share button appear, then click it. From there you can remove your access to the folder and remove it from your account.

[stoes40toes]

Yes, all the advice from this forum solved my problem.  Thanks to all!

[Walter]

Thanks for letting us know about this @stoes40toes - glad to hear you got this resolved.

Should you ever come up with any other Dropbox questions, let us know and we'll be glad to help!

Have a wonderful weekend! 

[ReluctantUserJC]

How does one become "on the same Dropbox Business team" as other users?  Apparently that's another solution to this problem...

As I understand it, the folks sharing the folder with me that is making me over quota ARE on my business team, but Dropbox doesn't seem to think so.  How does it make this determination, exactly?

P.S. Why isn't dropbox part of the spell-check dictionary of this forum's spell-check feature?

[Rich]

If they're only sharing the folder with you, then you're not part of the team. You would have had to join the team through an invitation, which would merge your account into the Business account (your account would belong to the business at that point, not you).

[Fluffmeister]

I'm getting exactly the same problem. Someone shared a folder with me a couple of months ago. That's used some of my quota. However, I'm done with the file now, but I was nervous about deleting it in case it deleted the folder in the cloud and they still needed it.

But having read this thread, it seemed safe to detach it - but having done that, I no longer have access to the folder (which is fine), but it's still showing exactly the same usage on the https://www.dropbox.com/account/plan page, although on the https://www.dropbox.com/home?d=1 page it shows the big folder as "Deleted" (and I hope it hasn't deleted it for the person who shared it with me too!) so it seems once a folder has been shared, that amount of space comes off my quota and can't be recovered.

I use a paid plan with Google Drive for my own personal cloud storage, so I only installed Dropbox because someone else wanted to share a folder with me that way - but I don't want to have a paid plan with Dropbox as well as Google; it gets a bit ridiculous if every time someone wants to share something I have to sign up to a new cloud service!

Presumably I can just close my Dropbox account and open a new one next time they want to share files, but that doesn't sound like a very convenient solution. Is there a better way?

[Rich]

Did you remove your access to the share, or simply delete the folder?

• https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/leave-shared-folder

[Fluffmeister1]

I couldn't work out how to remove access to the share - that's what I wanted to do, but I didn't have an option to do that. So I deleted the folder, and just hope I haven't screwed it up for the person who shared it with me. That didn't reduce the amount of space taken up either, so I deactivated my Dropbox account and set up a new one. That's obviously not the ideal solution! It doesn't seem to be very intuitive, and I tried following the suggestions on this thread, but the options people are talking about (like removing access to a share) simply weren't available to me.

[Fluffmeister1]

In fact, I think the problem is that the article about sharing assumes that I'm the one doing the sharing, and tells me how I can unshare. But it's not me who's done the sharing - someone else has shared it with me, and I want to now detach from that, but don't have the option to do so. There doesn't seem to be a help article about how to do that - do I need to contact the original person and ask them to unshare?

[Rich]

---

@Fluffmeister1 wrote:

I think the problem is that the article about sharing assumes that I'm the one doing the sharing, and tells me how I can unshare.

---

The help article I linked to above explains how you can remove a shared folder that you're a member of. Refer to the section titled Permanently remove a folder.