You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
daniel9
8 years agoNew member | Level 2
seleIncomplete syncing. Cloud icon in my local dropbox folder
Hello.
I recently downloaded dropbox to personal computer and am in the process of syncing files to this local hard drive. However, after linking my account and setting a few folders to not sync ...
- 8 years ago
Hello daniel9,
Thank you for the detailed description - It seems that you are in a Team and the Admin may have enabled Smart Sync for you.
With Smart Sync, users can see and seamlessly access all the content they have in their Dropbox, right from their desktops, without worrying about local hard drive space. Files and folders take up practically no space on the local device until they’re needed, and they can be accessed with a simple click.
With Smart Sync, content on your computer is available as either online-only, local, or in mixed state folders:
Online-only content
Online-only content shows in your local Dropbox folder, but doesn’t use the full amount of space that the file would. In your file explorer, you can see the file, but the content isn’t fully downloaded until you need it. Only information about the file, such as the file name, location, and date the file was updated, is downloaded.
Local content
Local content is downloaded and saved on the hard drive of your computer. You can directly edit these files from applications on your computer.
Mixed state folders
Mixed state folders contain both local and online-only content.
To sync files or folders locally:
- Open your work Dropbox folder on your computer.
- Click the Dropbox icon from the system tray.
- Click the folder icon.
- Choose Open [Your team name] folder.
- Locate the content that you want to make available locally
- Right-click the file or folder.
- Choose Smart sync.
- Choose Local.
You can also change the default setting for your new content:
- Click the Dropbox icon from the system tray.
- Click the gear icon and select Preferences... from the menu.
- Click the Account tab.
- Choose your work Dropbox account.
- Change the selection for Smart Sync Default:
- Admin default: the default setting chosen by your team admin.
- Local: all new content downloads to your computer.
- Online-only: manually download files to your computer when you need them.
To summarize everything in one sentence, in order to have all your content available to your computer, you need to select your folders and mark them as "Local" from the Smart Sync settings.
Thanks!
Jeff_
6 years agoNew member | Level 2
This really angers me. When I got the new version of dropbox, I selected not to enable smart sync. Later, when I noticed that I had to download files to access them I went back and checked the setting, which was set to "off" but with new content not set to "local". That pisses me off. Also lots of content that was very old (was not new) was synced to cloud. I don't understand how that setting was so screwed up and how so much of my content was not on my hard drive. I certainly hope if I had uninstalled dropbox that I would not have unknowingly lost all those files. I'm now working on transfering over to Microsoft One Drive as a result of this "feature" which had a forced implementation.
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