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Forum Discussion
secret_username1
2 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Dropbox limits on zipped files preventing downloading as backup to external drive.
Have ~1.5 TB of files on Dropbox that I'm trying to backup to an external hard drive.
My initial plan was to copy the local Dropbox folder from my PC to the external drive. However, I'd previou...
secret_username1
Helpful | Level 6
The limits only apply to Dropbox Basic, no? From here:
"Dropbox Plus, Family, Professional, and Standard: 1 TB of bandwidth and unlimited file downloads per day."
Can you point me to where I should go to allow the files to be on my local machine? No clear way to do this en masse given I have hundreds of thousands of files in deeply nested directories.
Rich
2 years agoSuper User II
secret_username1 wrote:
The limits only apply to Dropbox Basic, no? From here:
"Dropbox Plus, Family, Professional, and Standard: 1 TB of bandwidth and unlimited file downloads per day."
You're confusing different features. That line refers to shared links, not the process of downloading a folder as a Zip file.
Can you point me to where I should go to allow the files to be on my local machine?
Right-click on a file or folder (or select multiple and right-click) and select Make available offline. Keep in mind that with that many files, it will take a long time for Dropbox to sync everything back down to your computer. I recently marked a couple hundred thousand files as Online-only and it took a couple of hours. Be patient and let it work.
- secret_username12 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Ah, I didn't see the difference. Good catch! Clarifications about clicking "Make Available Offline":
1. If I wanted all devices synced to my Dropbox account to have local copies of all files, would I need to click it on each device?
2. Supposing I clicked it on each device, will all future changes to the files stored in the cloud be automatically downloaded on all devices? Or would I need to routinely click this button in the future because Dropbox will continue to convert files to online-only?
With this info I should be good to go.
- Rich2 years agoSuper User II
secret_username1 wrote:
1. If I wanted all devices synced to my Dropbox account to have local copies of all files, would I need to click it on each device?
2. Supposing I clicked it on each device, will all future changes to the files stored in the cloud be automatically downloaded on all devices? Or would I need to routinely click this button in the future because Dropbox will continue to convert files to online-only?
1. Yes.
2. If you're on Windows and you have the New files default option in Dropbox Preferences set to Available offline, then the files will download to the computer. I don't this this option exists on Mac any longer.
- crk__plus9 months agoNew member | Level 2
Hello Rich,
I am trying to do same - make an external hard drive copy of my Dropbox folders and files - however the size of my folders is too large to sync with my laptop and therefore I use selective sync for day to day connectivity to Dropbox. Is there a way to copy entire folders to and external drive? I am only using about 800GB of 5 TB. The two folders i want to copy to external drive are 513GB and 278 GB.
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