There are a few possibilities, and many can be done without needing to upgrade your dropbox account, so try them first.
- do you have access to dropboxes that you no longer need (or never needed…?) – maybe you inherited them from your predecessor or maybe they were from a previous job role. You can go into dropbox online and right click on them to remove them. They will then disappear from your dropbox list and will not affect your quota, but if you click on the garbage bin (top right) to show deleted files you will see them still there and grey. You can right click on them again and choose “leave permanently” which will completely disconnect them from you (if you needed them back in future you would need to be re-invited to them). If you don’t leave them permanently you can rejoin them in the future by right clicking on them again and choosing restore.
- do you have access to dropboxes that you rarely use or may never use again but you don’t want to completely remove now? You can always delete them (see previous point) but not permanently delete them. That will give you back their space now, if you restore them in the future you will still have a space problem though, but maybe you’ll never need to restore them.
- what is in your dropboxes? We have a tool that you can find in dropbox 100, 998 and 999 that will help. It is in the IAMtech tools folder and is called dropboxdirsize.bat. Run this. When it has finished running it will create a report named to match your computer name and with today’s date and stored in the dbreports folder (note not necessarily the dbreports folder of the dropbox you run the file from – it will always store it in dropbox 100 if that is available to you, and if not, in 998, and if not, in 999). This report can be opened in Excel. When you open it you’ll see a list of all your dropboxes and the sizes of each of them, and then every level of folder below them and the size of each of those folders and their subfolders. This allows you to drill down the largest dropboxes to see what the largest folders are, then you can see if they contain things that can be removed or resized.
- Are you storing pictures in dropbox? Don’t. Unless everyone with access to the dropbox needs them also. If you must store them in dropbox then PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE use a picture resizing tool to resize them. They will lose some quality in doing that, but as long as you aren’t planning to print them in A4 colour on photo paper then you’ll be fine (you should keep the originals on your harddrive for that) – the resized ones will be fine for viewing on screen, just not for quality photo printing.
- Are you storing videos in dropbox? Don’t unless it is really necessary. If it is really necessary use MP4 with high compression. But maybe there is a more appropriate place for you to keep them… Videos use a lot of space and dropbox doesn’t give us a lot of free space.
- dropbox accounts associated with IAM email addresses are for IAM use only. Do not store your personal files in these dropbox accounts. If you want to use dropbox for personal documents as well then you can have a second dropbox account using your personal email address and run two dropboxes on your computer at the same time. Use this link for instructions.
If none of this helps please let the IAM dropbox administrators know so that they can give you an opportunity to invite new users if there are any and that way you can gain more quota for your account. Ideally, please let them know when you are running out of space, not when you have run out of space. If you run out of space you may need to wait a few months before there is someone new to invite! If you need more space in the meantime you will need to buy it from dropbox…
DO NOT create extra email accounts for yourself and invite yourself to dropbox using them. This is dishonest.
DO NOT use google drive or another file sharing service for storing IAM documents. All IAM documents must be stored in dropboxes controlled by IAM, not in any other service. This is important to ensure that they are all being properly backed up and adhere to IAM’s information protection policies.