Free up Space in Dropbox Web and Mobile App without Paying for Extra Space

In this post, we’ll share 4 effective methods that will help you manage your Dropbox storage and stay within your plan limits.

 

 

 

Method #1: Compress Large Files and Folders

 

If you have large files/folders that you don’t access frequently, you can store them in compressed form to save storage. Compression will decrease their size without affecting the data inside. When you need to access the data, you can quickly uncompress it.

In Windows, right-click on the file/folder you want to compress and select Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder. It will compress the folder and save it as a .zip file in the same location.

For even more powerful compression, you can use third-party tools like 7-zip. Just open the large folder in the app and make sure you select the highest compression.

Depending on the data type, you can easily compress data to one-fifth of its original size. In the below screenshot, you can see how we compressed a 262MB folder down to 106MB with Windows compression and 58.9MB with 7-zip.

Method #2: Deduplicate Your Dropbox Account

You’ll be surprised how many duplicate files accumulate when you are creating backups from different sources or sharing data. People can have dozens of GBs of duplicate data without even knowing. It’s good to check if your Dropbox account has duplicate files that are taking up unnecessary space.

Doing it manually would be very difficult — if not impossible — so we recommend you use a deduplication tool to automatically find all duplicate files in Dropbox. Cloud Duplicate Finder is a great tool for this purpose that is easy to use and will find duplicate files for free.

Create an account and it will show multiple cloud storage services in the main interface. Click on DropBox here and give it permission to view and manage your Dropbox account (managed by Dropbox). You will see all your Dropbox folders in the main interface. Select the ones you want to scan and then click on Scan.

It will take a minute or two to scan and the app will list all duplicate files along with the space consumed.

You can individually see each duplicate file and apply actions like deleting new or old, moving duplicates to a separate folder, or deleting selected ones in bulk. 

Method #3: Delete Large Files

If you don’t mind deleting some of the data you don’t need anymore, then a more efficient way to do so is to delete large files first. This will help you save time and free up more space while deleting less overall number of files. Here’s how:

Note: Sorting by size doesn’t work for folders, you can also find large files using this.

Move to the All files section in Dropbox and click on the downward arrow next to the Name field. It will be invisible until you hover the mouse over it.

From the list, click on Size to open up the size column for all the files.

You can now click on this Size column to sort files by large to small. Look for any large files that you don’t need anymore and delete them.

Don’t worry about deleting them from the trash section as trashed data doesn’t take space in your Dropbox account.

Method #4: Manage Shared Folders

The folders and files that are shared with you for collaboration also take up space in your Dropbox account. If you are no longer working on a file/folder, then you should remove access to it so it doesn’t keep consuming space. Here’s how:

On the shared folder, click on the More menu (three dots) and select Manage permissions.

Now click on the drop-down menu next to your name and select Remove my access.

Make sure you unselect the Keep a copy of this folder option on the confirmation prompt.

Method #5: Transfer Files to Another Cloud Storage

You can also free up space by moving some of the data to any other cloud storage service. For example, you can create a new account in a cloud storage service that offers higher storage for free (like 15GB from Google Drive) and free up space on your Dropbox account by moving some of the data there.

Of course, moving the data would be a bit difficult manually, so we recommend using a cloud transfer solution to automate this process. Easy Cloud Manager can not only help you transfer data in bulk but also schedule recurring transfers.

In the main interface, you need to give permission to edit and manage both your Dropbox account and the account where you want to transfer the data. Once given, move to the Operations tab and select Dropbox in Source and the other cloud storage account in the Target section.

Now select the data you want to move from the Dropbox account and either start the transfer or schedule it.

The above methods should be enough to free up space in your Dropbox account without deleting important data. If you are still low on space, it might be time to upgrade your storage plan.