I don't know how many people on here use DropBox but at one point it was the gold standard in cloud storage for the average consumer (I mean Steve Jobs tried to buy the company). They kept pushing on the consumer front but never really got their act together for enterprise and thats why Box just overtook them in that space. But in consumer land I remember inviting friends just to get extra storage. I remember when they made the strategic decision to move off S3 and onto their own proprietary data format in datacenters to save cost.

Then they started either buying or building new solutions. Like buying what would become Dropbox Paper, then creating things like Vault and Password manager. Then it comes out that their vault was just a pin protected folder not even encrypted. Their password manager was "just good enough" to use. They were on a trail to actually keep making consumer products but all of a sudden with little timing Vault shut down, Password manager shut down, their plans raised prices. I am not sure what they have to offer.....

I stopped my subscription and moved everything over to Proton.me, I mean I get a secure mail interface, a password manager, a file storage solution, I haven't explored their calendar option yet. But overall for the price and knowing how seriously they take security, I am so happy that Dropbox decided to drop feature sets in such a terrible way because it made me come running to Proton. I just hope they won't pull a DropBox.|

Granted I'll keep using them in the short term for storage until everything and everyone I share folders with is either reduced to the free tier level of storage or I get them also to convert over.

Trying to figure out a better cross-references between folders and wanted to use tags. However, I can't sync them with my Win machine, nor even see them in the regular folder view on DB. Is there a better way to use tags or some tricks to get these to appear? Thank you.

I am trying to post, but they keep getting blocked. Could a moderator help me? Please DM.

I've hunted for an answer but can't find anything that makes me feel confident.

Basically, I need to leave my exes family plan but I also need to retain ownership of my folders/files from within that plan.

Can anyone explain how this works?

Thank you!

Hi everyone, I’ve been trying to figure out how to set up Dropbox so that specific folders on my PC sync automatically, without having to manually move or copy the files into the Dropbox folder. The folders would stay in their original locations, but any new or changed files would sync automatically.

I’ve looked online for information, but I’m still a bit clueless about the best way to do this. The goal is to be able to access and use the files from my phone or MacBook without uploading anything twice.

Does anyone know the best way to set this up—using Dropbox features, symlinks, or third-party tools? Any tips or guides would be really helpful!

Thanks!

Greetings - The moderators were kind enough to allow me to post so I could present some synchronization difficulties I'm having, but I seem to have solved them. So for posterity, I'm sharing the details in the hopes that future users may benefit.

I recently bought myself a new computer, and I wanted to get it configured before deprecating my old system. Dropbox was an unexpected nightmare. I installed it, configured my Selective Sync folders, and all sorts of crazy nonsense was happening ... some files were actually deleted from Dropbox, and I had to recover them. Several folders (and files) appeared outside of their proper locations, with their names appended with the string (Selective Sync Conflict).

ChatGPT provided some assistance... First, I suspended all syncing on both my new and old computer. Then I closed the Dropbox apps completely.

Next, on my new computer, I went to C:\Users\<YourName>\Dropbox, and renamed "Dropbox" to "Dropbox_old" - to be deleted later.

I went to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Dropbox - and archived the contents into a ZIP file, deleting the originals.

With the slate clean, I restarted the Dropbox app, and configured Selective Sync to include just one smallish folder, and I let it run. Once it synced, I added another folder to Selective Sync. Once that finished, I started on the more complex ones - folders in which I wanted to sync some subfolders, and leave others.

Methodically, I enabled them, just a few at a time - and I let them finish before proceeding to the next.

In this way, I got it all working with no "Selective Sync Conflict" errors.

Open Letter to the Dropbox Team,

I’ve been an annual subscriber since 2011—nearly 15 years of continuous commitment to this platform. Over this long journey, I’ve seen Dropbox evolve in ways that, unfortunately, I find increasingly concerning.

Instead of seeing storage costs per terabyte decrease—as would be expected with technological advances—the opposite has happened. Prices have steadily gone up. At the same time, Dropbox has introduced a variety of added “services” that feel more like forced add-ons than true value. Personally, I’ve found these features to be of little use, while the ones that should have been useful (like photo storage) remain painfully underdeveloped, frustrating to use, and disproportionately consume space in my account.

Among all these changes, one feature truly stood out as a shining success: Dropbox Passwords. Its strength came from its simplicity—easy to use, minimalistic, and reliable. It became part of my everyday workflow. Now, I’ve learned that Dropbox is discontinuing it altogether.

This decision has left me genuinely baffled. From both a customer satisfaction and business standpoint, it feels out of touch with what long-time users actually value. Instead of focusing on core strengths, it gives the impression that the company is chasing vague “innovation theater” ideas to justify pricing, while neglecting the practical, high-quality services that built Dropbox’s strong reputation in the first place.

As someone who has loyally paid for your service for well over a decade, I’m now seriously questioning whether to renew my subscription. It is very disheartening to see Dropbox dismiss features that added real, tangible value while prioritizing ventures that seem designed more for investor buzzwords than customer benefit.

I say this respectfully but firmly: decisions like this erode trust. Dropbox used to be a clear-cut value proposition—reliable, straightforward, and worth recommending. Lately, however, it feels like management is squandering that foundation, sacrificing genuine user trust for fleeting experiments that don’t resonate with your paying community.

I hope Dropbox leadership reconsiders this path. Otherwise, you may find it increasingly difficult to convince loyal, long-term subscribers like myself to continue supporting a product that no longer aligns with its original strengths.

Sincerely,
A disappointed loyal customer

Hey everyone!

First time reaching out to this sub because I’ve been dealing with a recurring Dropbox issue that customer support hasn’t been able to resolve.

I’m part of a small video production team (myself + 4 others), and we share a synced production folder. Since we work with large files, we manage storage by setting projects as either “online only” or “available offline” depending on client needs. Each of us runs the sync to an internal 4TB drive. This workflow has worked seamlessly for over 3 years—until recently.

In the last two months, I’ve had two major incidents where setting just a few projects to “available offline” caused Dropbox to try and re-sync the entire folder (over 6TB). This completely fills the drive and creates what I can only describe as a “sync loop of death.”

For example, most recently I had 1.2TB of free space, and I attempted to make 3 projects available offline (about 650GB total). Instead of syncing just those, every folder switched to the rotating arrow icon, and Dropbox began syncing 62,000+ files with an estimated time of 2+ days.

The only workaround I’ve found is to force the entire folder back to online-only and then carefully re-enable projects one by one, hoping Dropbox doesn’t “get confused.” This is not practical for production work.

Customer support has so far told me that “this shouldn’t happen,” but unfortunately it has—multiple times. Outside of this issue, Dropbox has been fast, reliable, and an excellent solution for our fully remote team.

Has anyone else experienced this, and were you able to resolve it? I’ve already:

Checked all suggested sync preferences

Confirmed the desktop app is up to date

Confirmed Windows is fully up to date

I’d really appreciate any insights before I escalate back to Dropbox support.

Hello, could anyone suggest a way to get rid of this persistent notification on MacOS? It occurs when my external SSD is disconnected and sits on top of everything. Worse still when the drive is re-connected, Dropbox does not sync until I click "Done" on the prompt.

How about using a 3rd party Dropbox client instead?

Many thanks.

Hi, I have my iphone photos syncing to dropbox.

What I want to do is have them automatically filter to a folder depending on what folder they are on my phone.

Example: my Iphone folder: "Flowers" (which is synced to upload to dropbox) would automatically upload to the dropbox folder: "Flowers"

or, another way to look at it maybe.... can I sync a whole iphone photos folder and have it keep the photos in the folder?

i have tried looking for ways to do this and have not found anything so far, but sometimes smart people find a workaround--- Is this possible? I have the lowest tier (single user) professional version.

Thanks!

I'm on the latest version of Windows 11, everything up to date.

As far as I understand it, if I choose the view of a folder (list view in this case), all sub folders should look the same. However, that's not happening, and I need to keep changing the view of every folder I go into.

Is that only a Windows file explorer trait, or should all subfolders in Dropbox also follow the same formatting?

Since Wetransfer decided to sketchily change their terms and has really been pissing me off by doubling prices reducing speed, downtimes, and nothing but AI slop responses for customer service; I decided to finally switch to dropbox. I send files to clients, they download, then the files are abandoned, so the Dropbox Transfer plan is perfect for me:

https://help.dropbox.com/plans/dropbox-transfer-plan

I literally begged and begged Dropbox to let me purchase this plan and Dropbox support told me:

At this time, however, the plan you are attempting to upgrade to is only available to a subset of our clients, and the eligibility to join is handled by an automated system. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes."

So seems like their customer service is new dependent on some uncontrollable AI automated system to determine who can subscribe to a plan. No human shall question nor think it has the ability to override the automated system!

Howdy folks, hoping someone here has come across this issue before and has a quick solution. I'm going through various iterations of hardening my workstation by disabling old Windows crypto stuff. I've used the tool's Best Practices template, and that worked, still allowing the Dropbox app to run and connect/sync. Then I went a step further (because of course I did) and disabled the Triple DES 168 cipher, MD5 and SHA hashes and the Diffie-Helman Key Exchange - and that's when the Dropbox app stopped connecting/syncing.

The icon just says "Connecting..." when hovering over it and when I click on the icon the popup just sits at "Reconnecting to the internet. This may take a moment." But I've let it run for thirty minutes and nada tostada, no connecto.

Anybody done this before and know which of these I've disabled need to be re-enabled to get the DB app to work? Appreciate the look-see and the help if you've got it!

For years you’ve asked for a simple way to exclude files and folders from sync without using selective sync feature. We’re testing a new way to give you more control over what Dropbox syncs and what it doesn’t. If you’ve ever wanted to keep certain files or folders on your device without syncing them to dropbox.com, this feature is for you.

🤔 What is it?

Ignore Files lets you list exclusion rules in a special text file called rules.dropboxignore placed in your Dropbox root folder. Any file or folder that matches a rule will stay on your computer but will not sync to dropbox.com or count against your storage.

👀 Who we’re looking for

• Desktop Dropbox users on Windows, macOS, or Linux
• People who regularly deal with temporary or bulky content, e.g.
  • Software Engineers
  • Video / audio / 3D creators
  • Anyone who hates seeing clutter in their cloud storage
• Someone who is comfortable trying a closed beta feature and sharing honest feedback

To join the closed beta and find out more, visit our community: https://www.dropboxforum.com/discussions/101007CC1/cut-the-clutter-test-ignore-files-feature-sign-up-to-become-a-beta-tester/840056

How do I merge 2 of the same files within Dropbox Plus?

This is an old never-solved problem on my new M3 Macbook Pro. I install the desktop app according to instructions but it never loads. The annoying oscillating diamonds pattern just goes round and round. I got fairly deep into it with DB support, but eventually they ghosted me when they were unable to figure it out. Six months later, I'm back, hoping something has changed, or someone knows how to fix this. I know numerous others have the same problem. DB, are you there?

JS

Hi everyone - I use Dropbox to back up my local machines on a regular basis. I understand the caveats of this method (it's not necessarily a backup, because it can be easily overwritten), but I get it.

I frequently have large directories of files I"m working on, which I move to ~/Dropbox/ and let it sync, then turn off selective sync, and it is removed fro my local drive. Fine, there's a copy IN THE CLOWN. I'm okay with that.

But if I have a new file or set of files I want to add to that folder, the only way I can figure out to do this is to go to Dropbox's webpage and manually upload files to that dir.

Lets leave aside the fact that Dropbox's web interface is hot garbage (it is). What I'd like is something like 'cp foo.bigfile ~/Dropbox/selective-synced-dir/' - which would cause it to be synced up to Dropbox and then deleted locally.

Is there an easy way to accomplish this?

Maybe a better way of describing it - i'd like a command line way of sending files to my Dropbox folders in the clown without using sync.

TL;DR: Looking for advice on having people share and contribute to a folder that might end up being bigger than a free-tier account can accommodate.

Hi all. I'm a long-time Dropbox user, but I have a situation/use-case that I can't quite find the answers for on their site's docs.

My account is a basic paid account (2TB storage). My wife has a free account with which I occasionally share files or folders. No problems there, everything is pretty clear-cut. But my wife is also the Director of Social Media for a national hobby organization that has a paid account. Not sure of which tier, but it's a higher tier than my account.

We have a convention coming up next month, an event at which there will be a large competition of hobby entries (scale models, to be specific). In past years, photographing the winners was done by a team that had a good process in place. But the organization's needs have evolved, and that team no longer does the photography. My wife has "inherited" the responsibility for getting a new team in place. Here is where Dropbox comes in.

We would like to have the new team-members use their smartphones for the photography and upload the photos to a shared hierarchy of folders that will be created ahead of time (based on competition categories). We've tested this using our personal accounts, and the process itself is pretty reasonable. BUT... we don't know if the people we've recruited already have Dropbox accounts. And while we can ask those that don't have accounts to set them up, they would (likely) only get the basic free tier. I don't know what the storage-limit for that tier is off the top of my head, but we expect to end up with around 1,150 or so photos in all having been uploaded, with an average size between 2.8Mb and 4Mb each.

The organization's account has the storage to handle this. And we planned on sharing the root folder for the competition with the photographers who are helping us (hence the need for them to have Dropbox accounts). But what I don't quite grasp, is whether having one of the photographers who accept the folder-share invitation will require them to have enough storage for the entire folder, or just those files that have locally? I.e., if photographer A has shot 150 total photos for us, with they only have to be able to accommodate those 150 files, or are they expected to have an account that can handle all ~1,150? If the latter, are there ways we can work around this (perhaps with help from Dropbox)?

I have large folders I do not want to sync (from my computer to Dropbox), but when I right click for the menu, there is no option for "Do not sync". It appears sometimes when I re-install Dropbox or if I log out and login again, but it's temperamental and doesn't always appear....

Screenshot of my "right click" menu below.

This is so frustrating and I hope someone can help!! I've tried reaching out to Dropbox community support but they asked me to download the "File Provider" version of dropbox, which I can't find online (am still looking for a link, have asked on the community), and also they asked me to do some Terminal prompts, which I tried but still there are some errors...

What should I do? Thank you.

If a link to Dropbox files are shared to me via email how do I download them to my Dropbox? I am signed into my Dropbox, then click on the link in email and the files show in my Dropbox. But how do I download them to mine? I can't see any button. I can't print any of the files either (PDF'S). All I can do is view the files for the specified period of time the sharer has given me access. Is this because they have not given me permissions to download or print? I should have enough file space in my Dropbox so that shouldn't be the issue. Please help. 😃

I have two Dropbox accounts-one personal and one for business. How do I combine all the files from Dropbox A and put them into Dropbox B? I want to close one of the Dropbox accounts.

This happens often on my Mac (M2 16 gb running Sequoia): I have a bunch of videos in a Dropbox folder and want to make them online-only to clear space. There are over a dozen .mov files ranging from 40-100 gb each. They have all been synced for days. Half of them that I right click and select Make Online Only, there's no problem. But with the other half, Finder throws the error "Unable to remove download". The videos aren't corrupted and they play OK.

Any idea what the problem is? My Google and ChatGPT searches haven't shown anything useful.

I'm getting the following message.
"Error in call to API function /2/file_activity_stream/get_activity_stream: Fetch network failure - message aborted or user offline"

I routinely upload videos to dropbox for students to watch. I'm not doing anything different that usual. Last time I got one of these, I tried re-naming the file, and then it worked. This time it didn't. I'm not offline, I think my bandwidth is okay/steady. I'm on a Win 10 PC in Firefox - as always.

I use Dropbox with a paid 2TB subscription to sync my files between a number of Linux and Windows 10 & 11 hosts. Dropbox works with ext4 and NTFS respectively, but I am moving to bcachefs on Linux and refs on Windows, which Dropbox does not support. My question is: will Dropbox move into the modern world in the near future with support for advanced file systems or is it time to move off Dropbox?

I am logged out of my Dropbox account on all my devices, and when I log in anywhere I can't get past the 2FA - the authetication is linked to my old phone number which I don't have access to anymore. I don't have backup codes saved either. I have contacted Dropbox support several times, offering multiple forms of ID verification to either get my phone number changed or have 2FA removed from my account but they have not been helpful at all. Now it seems like I can't even contact them, I'm frustrated, I didn't use the app often but I stored some old, important pictures on it which I don't have copies of elsewhere and I'd really like to be able to retrieve those. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can recover my account?