trying to make space

[Marshal mellow]

I'm going nuts here.  I have a folder that's quite large and I'm trying to move it to make space. I don't want it on my C drive because itt doesn't have a lot of space and Dropbox tells me I'm running out of space there. I decided to put it on a thumb drive but if I try to remove it from the other ones I'm told it will be deleted from all three. I click the sync something or other and I don't know what they're talking about. I don't know what I'm doing. Please help.

[Hannah]

Hey @Marshal mellow, sorry to see you're having trouble with this.

If you have a very large folder in your Dropbox and you don't want it to take up space on your computer, but still want to have it saved to your account, you can use selective sync.

With selective sync, you'll be able to remove it from your hard drive, but keep it accessible on other connected devices and dropbox.com.

I hope this helps, but let me know if you have any questions.

[Marshal mellow]

Thank you for your advice but I read the sync thing on the website and I don't understand it. That's my problem 😭

[Hannah]

Are you having trouble following the steps to accomplish this? What are you having an issue with exactly?

Let me know!

[Marshal mellow]

Hi! I'm possibly a bit slow but I get stuck immediately. I open my Dropbox desktop app and see my folders and files. Nothing about preferences. I don't have a Dropbox icon in my taskbar and have no overflow. I read step 3 and didn't even realize I had an avatar but I guess I'll worry about that when II get there.

[Marshal mellow]

Hannah, I guess I didn't understand "cloud" from the first time I used it. I thought that the whole point was that you could remove your files from your hard drive and they would be stored somewhere else, in the clouds with the angels. But apparently, it doesn't work that way. If they're cluttering up my hard drive and now my phone, what's the point?

[Jay · Accepted solution]

Hi @Marshal mellow, the Dropbox service is primarily to sync files from one device to another, and not to backup your computer or files in order to free up space on your computer.

As the syncing is live, any deletions on the computer would also be reflected on the site.

[Marshal mellow]

Oh. ☹️