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Forum Discussion
Dropbox full because of shared folder
Hi, i have a dropbox account and the free space that i have is full because of the files inside the shared folder that i have with some friends.
Is there a way to avoid that the shared folder that ...
Your English is very good Michele - well done!
And no, if you need read write access to that folder if will use your quota. If you just need read only access leave the share and ask the other person sends you a read only Shared link.
You can LEAVE and REJOIN a shared folder when ever you like.
So one method of getting space is to LEAVE the shared folder. And REJOIN it when you need it.
If you ONLY need some files from the shared folder and ONLY at some times, I would additionally ask the owner of the shared folder for a LINK to it, in that way you can use the link to it and download via web the files you need when you need them.
Although I don't agree with Dropbox, and this is the primary reason I won't spring for Pro, I understand why they did this.
It's simple, really. Say, someone creates 10 free accounts. 10 x 2GB = 20GB. Now, that person, from each account shares a folder with his main account. That person just got more, free, space.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who finds it utterly ridiculous that the contents of shared folders in Dropbox count against everyone with access.
And before Dave jumps in to try and explain it to me: I understand your access vs capacity argument, and that Dropbox charges for throughput and not storage. I get it.
It's stupid and I'll be leaving Dropbox because of it, but I get it.
Before I go: Picture fifty people each with their own Dropbox account and several machines on different LANs. Now picture a cron job running something something like "rm $HOME/Dropbox/*.random;dd if=/dev/random of=$HOME/Dropbox/$(date +YYmmddHHMMSS).random bs=1M count=2000" on one machine per person every few days. If this hypothetical situation wouldn't render those involved in violation of the terms of service (and if it would, I'm interested in which terms it violates, precisely), you can see how nominal use with shared folders actually requires lower monthly throughput than valid personal use by several separate individuals.
That specific example is a bit hyperbolic, but imagine any situation that involves a large binary file that is replaced every few days that needs to be synced across multiple machines without LAN sync and it sounds silly to still be arguing the data access point.
