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33 TopicsHow to Use Dropbox for a Perfect Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day is all about showing appreciation for the special people in your life - a partner, a close friend, or a family member 🤗. Whether you’re celebrating together or from a distance, Dropbox can help you make the day a tiny bit more special. Here are some fun ways to share the love 😻. ❤️ Create a Shared Photo Album Gather all those adorable (and maybe slightly embarrassing) photos and videos from throughout the year into a shared Dropbox folder. Organise them into a digital scrapbook so you can relive your greatest moments 💞. 💌 Plan a Virtual Date If you are in a long distance relationship or perhaps have pals who live far away, Dropbox can help you organise a virtual hang out. Share a playlist , a movie file or even a special dinner recipe so you can enjoy the same experience together, whether it’s a romantic date or a fun night with your besties 🤗. 🎶 Create a Romantic Rewind Playlist Music sets the mood, so why not create the ultimate playlist that reflects your relationship? You can link your favourite songs on Paper and relive the moments you heard them. Whether it's slow ballads, your favorite road trip tunes, or that one song that always makes you both laugh, it’ll be a soundtrack to remember 💗. 🎥 Gift a Personalized Slideshow Make your favourite memories shine by creating a slideshow of your best moments together. Add music, captions, and maybe even some inside jokes, because nothing makes you laugh or brings you closer than a perfectly timed meme in the middle of your sentimental montage 🤓. This Valentine’s Day, use Dropbox to share love, laughter, and and a little extra joy (or romance) with the people who matter most to you. ❤️ Do you have any fun or creative ways to use Dropbox for Valentine’s Day? Let us know below 💬2Views0likes0CommentsUnderstanding A, B, C, and D Drives: What They Mean and How They’re Used
Hey there, it's Theresa here 👋. You might see me around the Community, popping into different threads and joining conversations and I often notice users looking for the best ways to manage their storage effectively 🚀. By default, Dropbox saves files on your computer’s internal drive, typically the C: drive 👨💻. But sometimes, you need a little extra space, and the D: drive can be a great alternative. It helps free up valuable room on your primary drive while still giving you seamless access to your important files. If you want to learn more about setting up Dropbox on an external drive, check out this guide. But what about those other drives? The ones labeled A: and B:? Why don’t modern computers use them? And what exactly does the C: drive do? Let’s take a nostalgic and practical dive into the world of drive letters and what they mean in computing 💻. A: and B: Drives Ah, the A: and B: drives - ancient relics of computing! Back in the day, these drives were the VIP section for floppy disks, the original storage superheroes of the 80s and 90s. For those lucky enough to have never experienced floppy disks, let me explain: they were small, portable, and could hold a whopping 1.44 MB to 2.88 MB of data. That’s right, an entire three documents …if you were lucky 💾. Modern computers no longer come with A: or B: drives, as the floppy disk has been banished to the land of obsolete tech alongside VHS tapes and Blockbuster memberships 📼. However, those letters are still reserved for these iconic disks, almost like a tribute to the O.G’s of storage - here, computers have to pay their respects to the ancestors too. C: Drive The C: drive is the most important and commonly used drive in a computer system. It is typically the main hard drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) that contains the operating system (like Windows), applications, and most of your files 💻. In modern Windows systems, the C: drive is like your default "everything" space. It’s where the system stores its most prized possessions, from system files to personal documents to that folder full of memes you forgot about. Installing Dropbox on your C: drive is a great way to store your cloud files locally on your computer while keeping them synced across all your devices. So, think of the C: drive as the top drawer of your desk: it holds all the stuff you need every day, the stuff you’ll probably need soon, and the stuff you just threw in there to deal with later. Keep it clean…or don’t - but either way, the C: drive is where it all goes down 👩💻. D: Drive The D: drive is the unsung hero stepping in when you need a little extra space. It’s like the spare room in your house, or that second closet where you shove everything when company’s coming over 🙊. The D: drive is typically assigned to secondary storage devices. This could be a second hard drive, an optical drive (AKA CD/DVD drives ..remember those?), or even a partition on the same physical hard drive as the C: drive. And let’s not forget its role as the go-to for removable storage like USB flash drives or external hard drives. (Hint: Set up Dropbox on you D: Drive for those "I’ll definitely organise this later" files) 👨💻. So, whether you're optimizing storage, decluttering your digital space, or just taking a trip down memory lane, it’s always good to know what’s going on behind the scenes 😉. And hey, if you ever need help managing your files, you know where to find me 👩💻. I’ll be around the Community, diving into conversations and helping out wherever I can. Got any storage tricks, you or even fun computer nostalgia to share 💾💿📼? Drop them in the comments.. I’d love to hear them!54Views1like0CommentsNative macOS Dropbox App vs. Maestral
I stopped using the native Dropbox app a couple years ago because it was so resource intensive. I've been using Maestral since to view and sync my Dropbox content due to lighter footprint. I have a M3 MBP with 36 GB memory, running macOS 15.1 (Sequoia). Any feedback with use of current native Dropbox app? Happy with use and performance? Thank you.114Views0likes0CommentsOld Laptop with Old Dropbox-- how do I transfer files?
Hello Hive Mind! I recently fired up my old laptop (OSX 10.9.5, late 2009) and I cannot transfer files off of it. I have tried gmail, messages, airdrop, apple mail application, old flash drive... the works. Then I noticed that I had an Dropbox icon. It has Dropbox v1.1.35 and had my hotmail email as the account. It looks like it is working on the old laptop, and I uploaded a 253 KB .png file. However, when I go to my current laptop, and log into the browser Dropbox, it appears that I had to make an account with the same hotmail address. And I cannot find my files in the browser Dropbox. 1) Is v1.1.35 hopelessly outdated and should I just give up? 2) Do you have any suggestions about how to transfer these files off of my old machine?866Views0likes3CommentsHow do admins of orgs using Dropbox for Business support end users with syncing issues?
This is a general question for admins in organizations using Dropbox for Business. How do you support users who are having Dropbox syncing issues on Windows endpoints? I have been creating a screen sharing session where I can investigate syncing issues on the endpoint. It seems to me that Dropbox for Business is missing some kind of telemetry from endpoints that gives status on sync health back to the admin console. Something that reported back every 15 mins would be better than flying blind. I would even take a log file saved into the AppData folder that logged sync status when it wasn't "finished". It seems like a reasonable feature.1.5KViews0likes6CommentsDropbox Free - desktop, docs, pictures sync across devices
Hi folks, years ago, I could install dropbox on three of my devices, turn on desktop backup and what not, and my icons would appear on the desktop of all three devices. Just like onedrive. But these days, I can't seem to see the option. Sure, I can enable backups of desktop/pictures/documents, but all this seems to do, is create different folders within the dropbox section of file explorer. So I get PC1, PC2 and PC3, and all the folders in there. I don't want this though. For a start, it's difficult to work out which device is which. Has the feature I need been removed, and only available in "paid for" plans now? Thanks in advance!364Views0likes1CommentRemove "available offline" in finder under folders and files
Hello, Does anyone know a way to remove the “available offline” phrase in Finder under files and folders? First of all, the phrase seems completely useless considering it can be there along with the cloud icon that indicates that a file/folder is not actually offline but needs to be downloaded to be opened. Second, this useless phrase takes away the ability to show item info in Finder. I used to be able to see the number of files in a folder, the resolution of a photo, or the file size (if it’s an archive), but for some reason, Dropbox thinks that “available offline” is more useful than that. I am surprised I could not find anything on this. It seems like I am the only one concerned with this issue. Maybe there is a simple toggle somewhere in the settings that I am missing. Unfortunately, today I found out that your files can be marked “available offline” but still be in the cloud, and that is a deal-breaker for me. However, my annual subscription just renewed, so I’d like to find out how to remove this annoying “available offline” phrase and see my file/folder info until I find a replacement.480Views0likes2CommentsHow to fix being stuck on Indexing forever loop of death on multi million file DBs after db crash
Ok so I've used Dropbox for almost as long as its existed and recently due to frustration with the never finishing indexing bug I was forced to find out why this kept happening so I could prevent it. Bear with me on this long post but trust me its worth it, what I found was mind blowing and game changing. So our business Dropbox is more than 9 million files strong, I've noticed REALISTICALLY any machine handling over 2 million will just enter an indexing loop at some point from which it will never recover, after its happened 5 times in the last week I was pissed enough to that I decided I was going to find out why this is happening, I know I'm pushing the limits but we've had machines with 2.5m files running fine for years, why some work fine and some don't was a mystery, one I was determined to find out. When you add stuff to your Dropbox, Dropbox has to index it so it can know what to do with it. If you add "too much stuff" (copying 200,000 files of small size in one go, coders know what I'm talking about) or do it "too fast" (changing access permissions on 1.5 million files located within Dropbox in one go in less than 5 minutes) on a computer with too many files (1-2+m) this causes Dropbox to start indexing them all at once causing the system to slow to a crawl however if you don't let Dropbox finish before doing something else (like adding more files or using the computer for other tasks) or someone else adds a bunch of files on another machine its almost for sure going to cause Dropbox to crash and restart during this process (it happens quite frequently), this crashing and restarting triggers a full reindexing of the ENTIRE database, ALL files, and since the machine is already trying to download or upload some of the new files while trying to reindex the current millions of files, doing both at once overtaxes it, which causes it to crash, and were back to square one with the infinite indexing crash loop. This kept happening to us all the time, the only solution was to unlink and relink the Dropbox account so all pending changes were lost, we got a bunch of conflicted copies and spent days sorting out the mess. So I figured I needed to see what was going on with Dropbox, what it was doing when it was "indexing" to find out what was causing the crashes. So after looking for a while I found using Microsoft's sysinternals process monitor (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon) configured in a certain way allowed me to look at EXACTLY what dropbox was doing and I found out all I just told you and another very important piece of info. (if you want to see how awesome it looks in action check out THIS video:) When you click PAUSE FILE SYNCING you would think Dropbox pauses and ceases all operations, but you are wrong!, it pauses all incoming and outgoing transfers but any INDEXING tasks keep going! This is an absolute game changer! now if I see a machine that says "Indexing" for a long time, I turn on the process monitor, hit pause on the file syncing and watch as the machine does the indexing at super high speed (5-10 times faster than doing it while downloading), it usually finishes doing the full file reindexing in a couple of minutes once its done I can hit back resume and keep going, I've never had the app crash while doing this "offline" or "paused" indexing, thus avoiding the inevitable crash, and reindex loop. I have been successful in recovering 4 machines from the indexing loop of death using this method, where before I was screwed and had to eat the duplicate files and cleanup for a week and a TON of annoyed users in the office. Basically if your machine is taking too long indexing or is stuck indexing after a crash just hit "pause for 1 hour" and forget about it, it will still be working on the indexing in the background, and when it restarts it should have finished the re-index avoiding a crash when trying to download/upload the new files. Id wish Dropbox would have told us this, I never expected it to keep indexing while paused, I assumed pause was PAUSE, as in, cease all operations, it would have saved me so many headaches. All they need to do now is let us have a "log viewer" or something so we can tell when its done doing its thing and we can hit resume, also show us, even when in pause, when its indexing and when its not, so when its done we know we can restart it safely, or the better yet, set it to where if Dropbox has to index a large volume of files (say over 100), it will automatically pause all other disk operations until the indexing is complete, then restart the downloads, trying to do both does not work, i know you want it to but it just doesn't, and just causes the whole thing to explode non stop in a loop of death, maybe enable this on a setting somewhere? or auto enable it on machines with over 500k files? something has to be able to be done. TLDR: If your Dropbox is stuck indexing, hit pause 30 mins, and let it do its thing until its done, it will keep on doing it even when paused, you wont know if its doing anything or working unless you use procmon, but its working, and try avoid using the hard drive or the machine until its done, (usually less than 30 mins), and your indexing/crashing problem will be fixed. Message to Dropbox: Dear Dropbox, Please give us a way to view this info without having to resort to third party programs, this way we can help auto troubleshoot our Dropbox issues and take a lot of load off your customer service guys. Something like: Enabling a setting somewhere saying "activate/enable troubleshoot/server mode" or something that allows us to turn on an always shown (ALWAYS, NOT ONLY WHEN MOUSE OVER, BUT ALWAYS!!!) 3 tab little window, containing: Indexing files. (with a current list of the exact files being indexed and their speed (x files per sec)/paths) Downloading Files.(with a current list of the exact files being downloaded and their speed/paths) Uploading Files (with a current list of the exact files being uploaded and their speed/paths) There's another issue with slow uploads due to Dropbox connections stuck in a "stagnant state" (force closing the TCP socket connection using netmon restarts the download/upload and speed goes back up again) but that's another problem for another time. I hope this was helpful to some other sysadmin and sorry for the long message but it needed explaining.30KViews11likes12CommentsArch Linux Dropbox Gnome app indicator drop down menu
I use Arch Linux as well as many other Linux flavors. Often on Arch with Gnome desktop I had trouble getting the Dropbox drop down menu to look and perform properly. I searched the Internet but really found nothing addressing my problem. I actually gave up on it for a few months. While trying to correct another problem with the app indicator panel I installed libappindicator-gtk3. It solved the other problem I was working on but I got an added bonus in that the Dropbox drop down menu suddenly started working perfectly as it does on Linux Mint Cinnamon, Debian Gnome and MX Linux Xfce. So just a tip if the Dropbox drop down menu is not performing properly on Arch Linux Gnome, try installing libappindicator-gtk3 from the Arch repositories. It is in the Arch official extra repository. I think it's possible that this solution could also help on any Arch based distro such as Manjaro, EndeavourOS, etc. if the Dropbox drop down menu doesn't look or perform correctly. I also had the same problem on Fedora Gnome but I don't currently have a free test partition to try this with Fedora.2.3KViews0likes2Comments