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Forum Discussion
STOP Dropbox from backing up external drive
I made the mistake of accepting a request from Dropbox to back up an external drive plugged into my Mac. I didn't stop to think the files in that drive were going to be huge video files that should N...
Megan
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHey there sanchmo, happy Monday!
You should be able to see your external drive, inside your Dropbox folder. Can you confirm if this is the case here?
You can remove your external drive backup in the same way that you would any other Dropbox folder, by deleting it.
When you delete an external drive backup from Dropbox, it simply deletes it from Dropbox, not from your external hard disk.
Can you give this a go?
Thanks!
You should be able to see your external drive, inside your Dropbox folder. Can you confirm if this is the case here?
You can remove your external drive backup in the same way that you would any other Dropbox folder, by deleting it.
When you delete an external drive backup from Dropbox, it simply deletes it from Dropbox, not from your external hard disk.
Can you give this a go?
Thanks!
Hi there,
I have exactly the same problem. I accepted the request to back up my external hard drive without thinkint twice, and now mt dropbox is syncing nearly 1tb of photos unneccarily. Which will take ages and would take too much space from the dropbox. I did the mentioned steps already: Removed the folder where the files are synced to from the dropbox, disconnected the external hard drive, logged in and out, removed the whole app and installed it again. And STILL dropbox is syncing/trying to sync over 22k files. Even when the hard drive is not connected to the computer and there is no folder in the dropbox where it would sync the files to. How is this possible and how can I undo this?
Thank you.
Lately, when I connect an external drive to my Mac to back up to Time Machine, Dropbox asks me if I want to back up the drive to Dropbox. (The drive is NOT in my Dropbox folder.) I click NO... but the result is that somehow Dropbox disconnects my wifi! How do I keep Dropbox away from my external drives.
The external drive backup and its dialog screens are intentionally designed as they are so that it's hard for users to keep Dropbox from trying to backup complete harddrives. This helps forcing basic plan users to buy more space, because freeing up the space they have has intentionally been made annoyingly hard and for those that just give up and move to a less exploitive cloud storage service, now at least dropbox has a copy of your external drive. The Dropbox app not supporting 4K resolution displays on Windows 10/11 (cannot open settings on a 4K display) is probably also not an accident.
