How to manage Dropbox Backup for your team

Updated Oct 10, 2023

This information in this article applies to certain types of admins on Dropbox Professional, Essentials, Standard, Business, Advanced, Business Plus, and Enterprise.

Dropbox Backup provides an easy way to automatically back up important files and folders from your computers and external hard drives so that you can keep your content safe and quickly recover it if things go wrong.

Certain types of admins can manage Dropbox Backup for their team, including turning features on or off and viewing their team’s backup activity.

Notes:

If you’re on Dropbox Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise, your team can create as many computer backups as they’d like, as long as you stay within your plan’s storage space limit. The number of external hard drive backups your team can create is equal to the number of licenses you have.
- For example, if your subscription is for 15 licenses, your team can create up to 15 external hard drive backups altogether. You can choose to divide your external drive backups among your team as you’d like.
If you’re on Dropbox Business or Business Plus, your team can back up as many computer and external hard drives as they’d like, as long as you stay within your plan’s storage space limit.

How to turn Dropbox Backup on or off for your team

To turn Dropbox Backup on or off for your team:

Log in to dropbox.com with your admin credentials.
Click Admin console in the left sidebar.
Click Settings.
Click Backups under Additional settings.
Click the toggle next to the feature you’d like to turn on or off:
- Allow your team to enable camera uploads?
- Allow your team to enable computer backup?
- Allow your team to enable external drive backup?
Click Save.

How to view your team’s Dropbox Backup activity

To view your team’s Dropbox Backup activity and usage:

Log in to dropbox.com with your admin credentials.
Click Admin console in the left sidebar.
Click Activity in the left navigation bar.
Click the Activities filter.
You can track the following Backup-related activities:
- Enabled/disabled backup for computer: Shows if someone on your team has enabled or disabled computer backup on their device.
- Checked external drive backup eligibility status: Shows that a check was performed to see if someone on your team is eligible to create an external drive backup.
- Modified external drive backup: Shows if someone has enabled, disabled, deleted, or restored a backup.
- Changed computer backup policy for team: Shows if an admin on your team changed the computer backup policy for your team.
- Changed external drive backup policy for team: Shows if an admin on your team changed the external drive backup policy for your team.

You can filter the activity you’re viewing by Date, Activity, People, Participants and Content.

Learn more about viewing team activity.