Storage nightmares to avoid this Halloween

[Graham]

The Spooky season has officially arrived and we want to make sure the only fright you get this year comes in the shape of some awesomely dressed trick or treaters rapping, rapping at your door. We’ve noticed a few headaches pop up in the Community over the last year so we’ve gone all Frankenstein and built a monstrous list of Storage Nightmares and how to avoid them his Halloween.

Shared folders got you howling at the Moon

Shared Folders are a really great way to share your work and collaborate with others. They’re like an inter-dimensional portal that allows you to look directly into someone else’s content, kind of! While there are so many positives, there is also the risk of a potential storage nightmare by overloading your account with more information than your plan allows. 

When someone shares a folder with you, you don’t actually get access to their space on Dropbox, instead you get a synced copy of the folder in your own Dropbox. If you don’t have enough space left on your plan to fit a shared folder, it will fill your Dropbox quicker than a gang of flesh-hungry zombies swarming around brains and you won’t be able to access any of the files.

There are a couple of ways to get around this. You could always ask the person who sent it to re-send it as ‘read only’, this won’t require any space in your Dropbox. If you do need ‘editing’ access, the folder could be sent via a Shared Link and you’ll be able to open the folder on Dropbox.com without taking up any of your own space.

Gremlins in your laptop

We’ve all been there, once PCs and laptops get a few years old they inevitably develops a couple of Gremlins in the works and need to be replaced. This might be a good time to sell or pass your current machine to a friend or family member. The only problem is, you’ve got all of this information saved in your Dropbox and you don’t want to lose any of it or allow anyone else to access it. Here‘s a very simple guide to doing this without having to worry about eating after midnight!

If you have any kind of Dropbox plan, once you save something in Dropbox, it’s synced and saved in Dropbox. Whether your files are actually saved on your device or not, depends on whether you have them set to ‘online only’ or ‘available offline’, you can read more about this here. So, once you log into Dropbox on another device, you should automatically have access to all of your files. Once you’re sure everything is saved there, you can open up your new device and login to Dropbox.com and check that you have everything you need. 

When you’re happy that everything is stored safely in Dropbox, you can then go back to your old laptop and uninstall the desktop app and delete all the Dropbox folders. It’s a bit like an exorcism, only instead of casting demons aside, you’ll be casting unneeded folders aside.

Run for your life, not out of space

Much like a Ghostbuster’s Proton Pack quickly fills up with scary apparitions, a Dropbox account can quite easily become full too. If you want to avoid running out of space there are a couple of pretty simple space saving measures you can take. 

If you’re using Dropbox to save lots of images, you could take a look at your image formatting. JPEG or PNG files are much smaller than bulky files like TIFF or BMP and could save you some very valuable space. Likewise, if you’re using Dropbox to save lots of videos, you could try compressing these files before saving them, this will definitely free up some much needed megabytes.

If these space saving tricks don’t really cut it and you’re still running out of room, you could also try to earn some free space by referring som friends or family to Dropbox or, if all else fails, you could always upgrade to a plan with a bigger storage allowance.