my dropbox is overfull. How can that be?

[terskelton]

My dropbox is overfilled by many hundreds of percent. How can that be? I didn't put that stuff there and I can't see it to delete it or decide to buy bigger (which I don't need.) TIA.

[Walter]

Hey there @terskelton, sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

Could you take a look at your plan tab and let us know what's reported there in regards to your quota?

Do you maybe see any folders in your backups page?

Let me know what you find! 

[terskelton · Accepted solution]

Walter, this may be straightened out. My page was saying "Drop Box Basic: Out of Space. 57.39 GB used." It looks like one single file had put me over, a file I didn't even ask to put there. After that was deleted my page now says "0.99 GB of 2.5 GB used." It's hard for me to imagine one file being 56.4 GB. And I didn't understand how it could have been put there if : I couldn't access it and it overfilled my "box" by hundreds of percent rather then telling me a recent file wouldn't fit. They obviously wanted to sell me a bigger "box".  I don't use DropBox very often and therefore am not an expert but it would really be helpful if the size of each file was available at the top level rather than having to open each one to get properties. There are still aspects to this I don't understand but things look OK for now so thanks for the assistance.

[terskelton]

Let me also say that while I was deleting files that the box showing how much I had didn't appear to be changing so I couldn't understand what was going on. It was only after you had me follow your link to my plan that the indicator changed. A confusing program.

[Walter]

Thanks for your keeping me in the loop and providing your feedback on this @terskelton - much appreciated.

In any case, I'm glad to see that this is sorted now and please let us know if you have anything else to add or ask. 

[Rich]

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@terskelton wrote:

... it would really be helpful if the size of each file was available at the top level rather than having to open each one to get properties.

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Change one of the column headers to Size and it shows you all of the file sizes. And it will show folder sizes as well, once you calculate each folder size.

• https://help.dropbox.com/storage-space/file-size

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They obviously wanted to sell me a bigger "box".

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Sure, Dropbox would love to have more people subscribing, after all they are in the business to make money, but they aren't adding files to your account or putting you over your storage quota in an attempt to get people to upgrade. If you have a file in your account, then either you, someone with access to your account, or some process on your computer has put the file there.

Did you look to see what the file was before you deleted it? A lot of file types can easily grow to a large size, including video, backups, application installers, etc.

[terskelton]

Rich, thank you very much. Adding the size column is a big help. As it turns out the giant file was a video file but I couldn't tell what the material was creating the overload or how many files as I couldn't open it to find out. I'm sure my in-experience was involved as well. Historically I only use my account to store audio and I didn't realize how big a video file could be.