I have recently learned something about
dropbox that I thought I would pass on. Yesterday while AJ was uploading
wedding photos to the wedding folder, my system told me that I had used
3.5 GB of my 3.5GB allowance. I only have a few small folders, but I am
shared on a lot.
I grabbed a folder called
dropbox-Annabelle, and moved it rapidly to somewhere else on my disk. It
is now in my Temp directory, but still has the Dropbox icon on it. BUT,
it is no longer in Dropbox. I immediately dropped down to 2.7GB used. It is not on my other computer any more either.
What
this means is that when a folder is shared, it counts against the space
of each person that it is shared with. I had always assumed before that
it only counted against the owners allocation.
This means
to me that dropbox has ceased to be such a valuable facility for
storing and backing up files, and is of more use as a temporary transfer
facility.
I have a folder called 'New photos for grandma'
which has never been emptied. Do you think that she still looks at it,
or can I clean it up? Similarly the dropbox-Annabelle and dropbox-Jack
folders, I am going to archive elsewhere all pictures more than about 6
months old. But I don't own them, so if I delete the owners pictures,
are they going to be upset? We need to agree a protocol for how we
manage all these photos because it has become so obvious that we cannot
just use dropbox as a dumping ground.
