This feature is available to all Dropbox users, including those on the free Basic plan.
If you’re a Dropbox team member, and you’d like to manage selective sync settings on your computer, use this article. If you’re a Dropbox Business admin, you manage your team’s default selective sync settings.
Selective sync is a feature in the Dropbox desktop app that allows you remove specific Dropbox folders from your hard drive so you can save space on your computer. The folders you choose to remove from your hard drive remain stored in your account on dropbox.com.
Note: You can’t remove individual files with selective sync—only folders, which includes the files and folders inside them.
Note: The selective sync preferences you choose are unique to each computer and don’t affect the other computers you use with Dropbox.
Selective sync lets you choose which folders you’d like to store on your computer’s hard drive from all of the folders you have stored in your Dropbox account. If you check a folder, that folder and the files and folders inside it, are saved to your hard drive. If you uncheck a folder, that folder and the files and folders inside it, are removed from your hard drive, and are only stored on dropbox.com.
Learn how to see the sync status of your folders.
Learn what the different sync icons means.
Note: You must install the Dropbox desktop application to use selective sync.
To choose which Dropbox folders to store on or remove from your computer’s hard drive:
Note: Smart Sync is only available to Dropbox customers on Plus, Family, Professional, or Business plans.
Smart Sync also helps you save space on your hard drive. Instead of completely removing files and folders, Smart Sync lets you make files and folders online-only so they’re still visible from your computer, even though they’re only stored in your Dropbox account online. It also has an automatic setting that makes files and folders online-only, based on how you use them.
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