Sanity check: Dropbox

[jmak]

Can anyone tell me whether I'm correct or not about needing to have a paid for Dropbox account to access files and folders that have been shared with me?

 

Someone shared a folder with me yesterday so I signed up for a free Dropbox account which apparently has 2GB storage, but the folder contains 3GB and I get an error message saying that I don't have enough storage. That seems entirely unreasonable since the person sharing it has already paid to store the data on Dropbox's cloud.

 

Today I have a user asking for us to pay for a Dropbox professional account and before I say no as we already have unlimited cloud storage as part of M365 ("only" 5TB per SharePoint site, but they can create as many as they want), I wanted to check as it might be that they're trying to access stuff someone has shared with them.

[andy_b]

I believe that needing an account will depend on the type of share they have sent, a collobrative share or just a "just" a share.

 

https://help.dropbox.com/share/join-folder-without-account

 

https://help.dropbox.com/share/share-outside-dropbox

 

I imagine a collobrative share might require an account with enough space available.

[jmak]

Thank you. It still seems ridiculous/sharp practice to charge twice for storage even if you are collaborating with someone who's paying for the storage space already.

[elsiegee40]

I suspect sharp practice. We used to use Dropbox as a family but found the shared storage thing was a pain. If you share the amount gets taken from every person’s allowance. So I would create something, share it with Mr gee40 and both children and they all found their allowance reduced!