If you’re like many of my clients who use Dropbox intensively, you have a desktop Mac with a large drive and a MacBook with much less drive space. How do you prevent your large Dropbox account from overwhelming the laptop Mac’s available storage? Dropbox offers two ways to save local space. With selective sync, unchecked folders disappear from this Mac's Dropbox folder but stay in your Dropbox account. Click the Dropbox menu bar icon, open your account menu, and choose Preferences > Sync. Under Select folders to sync to this Mac, click Modify, uncheck folders you do not need locally, and click Update. You can still use them at dropbox.com or select them again to sync them to this Mac.
Online-only files, formerly called Smart Sync, remain visible in Finder as placeholders. To free space while keeping a file visible, right-click it in your Dropbox folder and choose Make online-only. Opening it downloads it, so you need an internet connection and enough free space. Choose Make available offline for files you need without internet access. Do not delete files to free local space: deleting an online-only file also deletes it from Dropbox and your other synced devices.
(Featured image based on a photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash)
If you use Dropbox on iPad or iPhone you don't need to worry about this. Dropbox for iPad and iPhone will only store files you explicitly ask it to.
If you’d like a hand with this, I offer one-on-one tech tutoring in San Francisco and Washington DC, and via Zoom for anyone anywhere. Book a session, and we can go through it together at your pace.