Dropbox full because of shared folder

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.

@Dave @Adam,

Guys guys, don't you think it's time to stop bickering and bury the hatchet? You're not getting anywhere in this discussion. 

I'm getting out of this discussion anyway, making my final statement:

I understand what Dave is saying: you're paying for the USE (storage, bandwith, lookup etc) of files that are shared with you, not the storage.

And that's where we are disagreeing. Let's look at this analogy: someone says to me, if you want to borrow one of the great books I have in my extensive bookcase, feel free to do so. Dropbox way of handling this is having me pay for the complete collection of books that is provided to me, even if I've not even read or borrowed one of them. That's crazy. That's like having the library charge every customer for all the books they've got in storage.

If they want to charge me for every file I actually access, fine.

And now go play outside ;-)

grtz, Cors

You keep saying the same things over and over again, as if it will suddenly explain away the problem. And let me be perfectly clear, here: there is a problem.

If your service is marketed by storage capacity per user (and Dropbox is), you can't explain away users' complaints about how sharing affects their storage quotas by citing additional throughput cost. Throughput and storage capacity are two entirely different things, and to limit one on the basis of the other is deceptive when you are promising a certain amount of space at signup.

I also acknowledge that you're just a user, and that you're not the one with whom I should be arguing this point. I was a Dropbox Pro customer until a few months ago when I realized that the space I was using did not exceed the capacity I would still have had as a free user.

You stated earlier in the thread that you aren't here to defend Dropbox, but rather the pricing scheme they use to "make money and survive." Promising users two things (storage and file sharing), and then telling them they may have to pay more to use both of them at the same time, sounds an awful lot like a scam to me.

You seem to think that simply because you are paying for the service, our complaints as free users don't carry weight. You can argue that the only thing they do is storage, and that they might go under unless they boost profits in this very specific, dishonest way. You can argue that as a business, paying customers' voices matter more. I can only hope that enough people realize how incredibly sleazy it is for Dropbox to operate this way. I'll hope that when confronted with the choice between paying for more space and not joining the shared folder they were just invited to, that they'll instead drop the service altogether and move to a solution that doesn't lie to them.

I'd make a comment about what you and the pompous, elitist, "I'm a paying customer so your complaints are less significant" high horse you rode in on can go do in private, but that would be rather vulgar.

Seems to me Dave is: 1) an employee of DB, 2) a paid troll or 3) An unpaid troll, sadly doing this for free. No one else could possibly defend this shady, opaque sales tactic, regardless of the technical gibberish behind his logic. I'm done with DB. Disconnecting this account. Dave, enjoy!!

Dear visitor,

If you came here because you Googled "Dropbox full because of shared folder" (or something similar), save yourself some time and do not read the posts above. Often on the Internet technical discussion quickly deteriorates to names calling, personal attacks, attempts to demonstrate to (typically very small) audience: "I am smart, you are not", irrelevant analogies (typically: "it is like a car engine, you see...")... etc, etc. Be smart:

GO HERE and read ONLY THAT:

https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/storage-space

Dave: What your comments don't seem to address is the reason many of us in this thread are complaining. It is never made clear to the user during the process of sharing or joining a folder that its contents will count against all users with access. From signup, (free) users are told that they have "2 GB of space." Well within that limit, a user accepts an invite to a folder belonging to someone else, and suddenly that 2 GB of storage they were promised is gone.

Sure, you can explain why exactly it works this way every time someone posts a thread like this, but as it stands the whole thing feels dishonest. One of Dropbox's largest advertising points is the ability to share files, and yet as soon as a user tries to take advantage of this feature it looks like it comes at the cost of storage capacity.

Don't tell people you're giving them "2 GB of space" and "simple file sharing," only to turn around and take away some of that space as soon as they join a shared folder. It's misleading, it's deceptive, and it's why I'm leaving.

Interesting and heated discussion. A few points:

firstly Dropbox explains what is discussed here in one of their help center notes: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/storage-space It is worth noting that different approaches to storage quota calculation are used for business and for free accounts,

secondly, after reading the discussion I do believe that the major complain was brushed aside by some as irrelevant (or not worth commenting). The fact remains that, that at no point when using Dropbox, I was made aware that the use of shared folders comes at the cost of storage capacity (yes, this info is available if you specifically search for it). Dropbox can adopt any model they feel works best for them, but not clearly warning about that fact amounts to unethical marketing practice.

just my 2c.

Every few weeks, I realize there's a new e-mail waiting for me off in that "Forums" tab of Gmail, and I skim through all the new comments in this thread before archiving the chain and forgetting about it for another few weeks. Every time, it's always the same back-and-forth.

1. Another perfectly valid complaint about how shared folders affect storage quotas in a completely unexpected manner.
2. An explanation of how shared folders affect storage quotas, whether or not the user indicated that they already understood that.
3. A reply from a user about how it's not intuitive.
4. A detailed reasoning why Dropbox chose to implement shared folders in this manner, failing to address the point about how it isn't intuitive.

Let's clear something up: we are not here trying to argue the facts. We understand how storage quotas are affected by shared folders. Painfully well, I might add. Some of us think this behavior should change, but that's actually a separate discussion that requires first-party input from the folks actually running Dropbox, and is beyond the scope of a thread on the forums.

The very fact that this thread exists underscores exactly the problem: that shared folders affect storage quotas in a completely non-intuitive way--a way that is not made apparent to the user without effectively resorting to reading the manual.

Does it make some amount of sense for them to operate this way from a technical standpoint of having to host and serve the massive amount of data that Dropbox is responsible for? Yes, but again: this is a separate discussion.

Your users are coming to you--many of them not knowledgeable in the field of information systems--telling you they are confused by a specific implementation detail of your platform, and all they get in response is a technical, detailed explanation of why it works the way it does. What's more, each user--sometimes the same user, multiple times--is having this explanation reworded at them, ad nauseam.

How does it fail to dawn on everyone that this is a completely inefficient way to handle the situation? If this information were simplified and presented in a concise manner, up front and without having to dig around, this thread wouldn't even have been made.

And that, right there, is exactly the point I was trying to get across two pages ago. Your users have certain preconceived expectations, and if you are going to operate against those--as is Dropbox's right--is it not obvious that you should make that clear up front instead of waiting until it frustrates someone enough to complain, possibly abandoning your service?

Yup GoogleDrive. with ocr for documents too. See ya.out.

Yeah... just going to chime in here with this being only PART of the reason I went to a self-hosted ownCloud instance on my dedi. :)

--Cheers guys, it was "fun" while it lasted... except not so much.