If you’re an admin on a Dropbox team account and you’d like to manage your team’s hard drive space, learn how to manage your team’s default online-only settings.
You can sync your files in three different places with Dropbox:
You can set files to either:
Notes:
In the Dropbox desktop app, there are two ways you can make files online-only.
You can also set files to online-only on the Dropbox mobile app. Online-only files won’t occupy storage on your local hard drive.
Note: When you open an online-only file from the Dropbox folder on your computer, it will automatically download and become available offline. This means you’ll need to have enough hard drive space for the file to download before you can open it. You can change it back to online-only by following the instructions below.
To make files online-only using the Manage hard drive space tool:
A confirmation message will appear indicating the amount of hard drive storage you’ve freed up. Additionally, the files set to online-only will be removed from the suggested files list in the Manage hard drive space tool.
To make files online-only in the Dropbox mobile app for Android or iOS:
The toggle symbol will turn gray. This means that the file or folder is online-only.
To make all files that you add to the Dropbox folder on your computer online-only by default:
All future files and folders added directly in the root directory of your Dropbox will be online only. New files added in the root directory won’t take up storage space on your computer once they’ve been added. These conditions don’t apply to files or folders that already exist.
Note: If you create a document directly on your computer and move it into your Dropbox folder, it’ll still be available offline unless you manually set it to be online-only.
When you set a file to online-only, it’s stored online and won't take up storage space on your computer or mobile device. Online-only files take up storage space on dropbox.com.
If a file or folder is available offline, you can open it from the Dropbox folder on your computer or the Dropbox mobile app even when you’re not connected to the internet. This means that it’ll take up storage space on your computer or mobile device and dropbox.com. If you don’t want a file or folder to take up storage space on your device, set it to online-only.
If you’re on Windows, check for the sync symbol described in this article.
If you’re on Mac, check for the sync symbol described in this article.
Note: If you haven’t set a file or folder to online-only, then all files and folders in the Dropbox folder on your computer are available offline. Learn how to make your files and folders available offline.
You must be connected to the internet to open online-only files from the Dropbox folder on your computer.
You’ll see an online-only file or folder in the Dropbox folder on your computer, but it’s just a placeholder.
Right-click the file or folder, then click Get info. The information will show next to Size.
Online-only files take up a small amount of space on your hard drive as the placeholder requires space to store the file name and the shortcut to dropbox.com. Still, this takes up much less space than the file itself would.
If you’re using online-only files with macOS 10.13 to 12.2, you may notice that online-only files appear to take up space when you try to manage storage space in your Mac settings.
The reason for this is that file size is calculated based on something called “logical size” rather than “physical size”.
To see which files are really taking up your storage space, adjust your Dropbox settings so that online-only files have both logical and physical sizes set to zero. To do so:
If you delete an online-only file it will be deleted everywhere you use Dropbox.
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