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Selective sync is misleading and has led to my company not using Dropbox properly 😠
My company's Dropbox is quite large and obviously it would be undesirable to sync its entire contents locally. Yet during Dropbox login, you are told that your hard-drive does not have enough space, leading you to think that you should use selective sync to minimize what folders get synced. Moreover, this same idea is implied on the description for the Selective Sync option itself: The option implies that if you sync files to your hard-drive, they will use hard-drive space. Yet, all of this is false. Dropbox syncs files as online-only. They only download locally when opened or if the folder option is set to "Make available offline". Consequently, numerous people at my company have not been syncing folders. They've been using Dropbox through the browser, which is tedious and has encouraged them to keep work files locally or elsewhere in order to avoid the aforementioned tedium. Who knows how many hours this has wasted across the company over the past couple of years. This might some of the worst UI design I've ever encountered. Dropbox is sabotaging the way in which users want to use their product. I'm a long-time Dropbox user. I stuck with the product out of loyalty. If I had wanted a cloud drive in 2025 and ran into this, I would not used Dropbox. TLDR: Please stop telling users that their hard-drive space will get consumed when they log in. Please change the Selective Sync description to not imply that hard-drive space will get consumed on synced folders.
I only want to manually back up static folders to Dropbox, without the app syncing all the time.
Device: Macbook Air Operating System/Browser (if using the web): Sonoma 14.6.1 Syncing Status: paused indefinitely Question or Issue: I want to use Dropbox as a backup for folders, manually uploaded by me intermittently. I do not want it to be syncing with my computer. When I installed the app it began trying to sync with folders on the computer, which is not what I want. But when I tried to upload via the chrome browser it kept failing for large folders. (This is rather absurd. If the browser version can't handle it large folders then the app should be able to.) I just want to be able to back up (e.g.) my Documents folder or some subset of it, from time to time, with a date on it, as a static backup. I don't want to work from dropbox, I don't want it to be syncing constantly with my computer. How do I do this? I don't need "why are you doing this, why not just sync?" I don't want to. I don't trust such syncs. I don't want a problem with dropbox to possibly propagate downward into my local files. (You can say this is unlikely -- I don't care, I want it impossible.) Thanks.My Dropbox app is stuck syncing files on Windows 11 after an advanced reinstall.
Device Desktop PC Operating System/Browser (if using the web) Windows 11 Pro Dropbox App Version (if using the app) 237.4.5655 My desktop app has been stuck syncing for about a week. We ran out of space on our work Dropbox network (80TB used). I freed up around 20TB of space and all PC's on the network apart from mine successfully (after some time) synced the changes. Mine however was stuck at 5.5 million files syncing. I left it to do its thing for several days with no change. So I followed the "advanced reinstall" instructions on this page https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstall. The reinstall was successful and it seemed as though things were moving again. However for the last few days I've been stuck with between 12,000 and 16,000 files syncing. The number gradually goes up day to day. I'm working on Dropbox still, as are my colleagues so this may be why. I have to manually download my colleagues files and place them where they should be syncing before using them. When I hover my mouse over the DB icon in the system tray it says its downloading the 16k files, uploading around 40 files. But very little download up upload bandwidth is actually being used. I have a gigabit connection so I don't believe its actually doing much at all on the network. How can I fix this? We have around 60TB of files on our DB network and I have around 500GB of that synced at any given time. Thanks for any assistance!
I'm missing the Dropbox icon from my Windows explorer.
Application Affected Dropbox Device Asus Vivobook Operating System/Browser (if using the web) (Windows 11 25H2d, Mozilla Firefox Dropbox App Version (if using the app) 238.4.6075 Question or Issue Hi! I have tried to open up "properties" for the dropbox icon and chose one image as new icon but it won´t take it. Nothing happens. I am on a Windows 11 25H2 and the app version is 238.4.6075. Does anyone know how to solve this? I´d appreciate all help could get! Thanks...
