Under Save hard drive space automatically, select On.Open your Dropbox desktop app preferences.That way, the files that you don’t regularly use won’t take up space on your computer. You can turn on automatic Smart Sync so that files that you don’t open from your computer for a few months become online-only automatically and new files you add online become online-only by default. However, those files will no longer appear in the Dropbox folder on your computer. Selective sync also helps you save hard drive space by removing files from your hard drive so that they’re online-only. Dropbox removes it from your computer’s hard drive, so that it only takes up space in your Dropbox account online.Īnytime you open an online-only file, Dropbox automatically changes it to be “local” again, but you can change it back to online-only at any time.
You can only open it if you’re connected to internet. If you set a file or folder to online-only, you’ll still see the file or folder in the Dropbox folder on your computer, but it’s just a placeholder. This means that they take up space both on your computer’s hard drive and in your Dropbox account and are available whether you’re online or offline. If you’ve never turned on Smart Sync or set a file or folder to online-only, then all of the files and folders in the Dropbox folder on your computer are “local”.
