Selective sync is a feature in the Dropbox desktop app that lets you choose folders to remove 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, and 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.
You can view the sync status of your folders from your desktop app preferences or from the Dropbox folder on your computer:
Local — The folder is saved to your hard drive and dropbox.com
Syncing/Updating — The folder is updating
Other sync statuses:
Online-only — Learn more about online-only files in this Smart Sync article
Mixed — The folder contains files and/or folders that are local and online-only
Note: You must install the Dropbox desktop application to use selective sync.
To check and uncheck which folders to store on your computer:
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 on dropbox.com. It also has an automatic setting that makes files and folders online-only, based on how you use them.