Q: dropbox use on macbook air
i'm feeling a little brain locked with dropbox on my mac air. i've been running out of space and can't tell if the 150GB on my dropbox folder is actually taking up this amount of room
on my HD. i tried the DB docs and can't figure this out.
obviously it does not take up timm on my iphone even though i can access all the files on my phone.
does anyone know how this works and how i would keep some of the data from taking up HD space if it does take up space?
THANKS FOR ANY HELP
MacBook Air, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), 11 inch, early 2015; w/BC WIN 10
Posted on Oct 6, 2016 11:46 AM
You set up selective sync in your Dropbox preferences, under the Account tab. Set this individually for each computer that is connected to Dropbox. You can get to preferences by clicking on the Dropbox icon toward the right in the menu bar at the top of your display. Click on the little gear icon at the lower right of the screen that drops down when you click on the Dropbox menu icon. From there, a menu comes down in which you can select "Preferences". That is where you set up selective syncing, in the Account tab (Selective Sync: Change Settings…).
1. Things happen. If I accidentally deleted something in the Dropbox Sync Folder, it would also be deleted online. If I acidentally deleted something from the Dropbox server, and it was set to sync with my local folder, it would vanish from my local folder. I'm not a rocket scientist, so I don't take that chance with critical files.
2. For whatever reason, you can't drag a folder into Dropbox via the browser interface. You create a folder through the web interface, name it appropriately, open it, and drag and drop files into it, at which point they get uploaded.
3. You can retrieve files not synced to your laptop through the web interface. There isn't anything more to it than that. I choose to NOT keep 600GB of images from various cameras and film scans in the local Dropbox folder.
Posted on Oct 9, 2016 9:53 AM