Dropbox - short of space!

[Jon12345]

I bought an S5 and got a 16GB by mistake. So, I am short of space on the phone. I bought a SD Card with 64GB of space.

My dropbox folder will soon rise to 30GB of data.

Is it possible to have dropbox look at the SD Card insead of the internal phone memory? I think I read something about there being a restriction due to Google's policy on storing data on SD Cards.

Anyone know?

Thanks,

Jon

 

[SpookDroid]

Hi Jon,

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by having Dropbox 'look' at the external SD... You can certainly upload stuff from your SD card to Dropbox and download stuff from dropbox to the SD card. The restrictions on KitKat with SD cards is that an app can only have full read/write access to a folder it created on the SD card, but only read privileges to some other folders on the card.

PS: I thought you got 50GB worth of Dropbox for two years with new Sammy phones.

 

[Jon12345]

I have 50GB of space but the files I store in dropbox will soon rise to 30GB. That means, I cannot store the dropbox data on the internal phone storage. So I have a problem using dropbox now, as I do not believe you can have dropbox create a folder on an SD Card.

 

[P_Devil]

Are you storing everything in your Dropbox account on your phone or just accessing it? You don't need 30GB of storage to access your content and, by default, Dropbox doesn't download your files to your phone. You have to manually initiate the download process. That's different from PCs where Dropbox automatically downloads content by default.

 

[SpookDroid]

Just as P_Devil said. Dropbox DOES NOT download anything to your phone unless you specifically tell it to. Even by syncing, only if you manually select each file for offline use, it doesn't store a local copy. So, even if you have 30GB worth of files in Dropbox, doesn't mean that you need 30GB of space in your phone to access any of those files (think of it as a Netflix for your files. The files are stored in their servers, not your phone, unless you download them, and when opening them, only a temporary copy is created, just like streaming a movie).

 

[Jon12345]

Oh that makes a huge difference then! Not problems then. Now what am I going to use that SD Card for..?

 

[SpookDroid]

I'd use it to store temporary copies of media files, like movies and stuff like that, for offline viewing. I wouldn't recommend using it to store your camera pictures since, well, you don't want to be the guy who lost all pictures of the last vacation trip because his SD Card failed and the pictures didn't back up to a cloud service.