If you’re a Dropbox user, you probably have your Dropbox folder installed at the default location – on your systems drive the Main (C:) drive.
If you have upgraded to Dropbox Pro with 1 TB of storage space – sooner or later you’re probably going to run into a storage space issue on your local computer – unless your current Main (C:) drive is already larger than 1 TB.
Keep reading to learn how to move your Dropbox Pro folder if your (C:) drive is full.
My C: drive is 500 GB, with the operating system and installed software taking up about a third of that. Another portion is taken up by cached files, recycle bin files etc. – leaving only 200 GB or so for file storage.
So, if you have a 1TB Dropbox Pro account, you can’t fit 1TB of files onto 200 GB of available local space.
However, most desktop computers come with a separate storage drive – in my case, I have a 1 TB storage drive Storage (E:).
(If you don’t already have a separate storage drive, its a good idea to store your files on a drive separate from your systems drive anyway, and it’s pretty easy and inexpensive to add an internal hard drive.)
Fortunately, it’s really easy to move your Dropbox folder from your (C:) drive to your storage drive (E:).
Right click on the Dropbox icon at the bottom right hand corner in your systems tray. Select the gear icon and click on “Preferences”.
Click on “Account” and select the “Move” button under where is says Location.
Select the location where you would like to move your local Dropbox folder to – and voila – Dropbox will automatically move all of your files from the old location to the new location.
Also, if you are working on a laptop or other device that doesn’t have a separate storage drive, or if even your storage drive is too small, you can set Dropbox to only sync selective folders locally.
To do that, click on the “Selective Sync…” button and de-select folders that you don’t want to sync locally.
The folders that you de-select will still be available on Dropbox.com – but not locally.
This does take away some of the convenience of Dropbox, so use “Selective Sync” as a last resort.