Child Item

Cannot account for Total Team Space

Good Day,

I manage dropbox for a team of around 100 accounts. We were happily using Dropbox Standard until dropbox indicated that my Team total usage is above 5TB limit for standard plan. I was then forced to upgrade to Dropbox advanced to keep the team going and allowing them access to there files.

However I found this quite strange as we generally control our space between the users. Using the dropbox admin interface I can only account for 3TB of space and cannot for the life of me account for the extra 3TB+ that Dropbox claims I am using. I have had multiple discussions with Dropbox support where the agent end up conceding that the numbers look strange and they will have to escalate to an engineer, only to come back to a generic answer like "the space shown is the total of team folders, shared folders, backups, and root drives".

Since Dropbox bills me based on space consumed, I find it unacceptable that I cannot account for the space through my admin interface so that I can eventually manage and ask the correct team etc to check on what is going on.

I have added up the totals shown in dropbox admin console, in "Members" Tab Plus the usage's shown under "Content->Team and Shared".

Question is, What am I missing? how can I account for all my space used when adding up the elements on the admin console does not come close to the total Dropbox claims we use.

Thanks

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Comments

Mark

My guess here is that people have activated Dropbox Backup which seems to be not showing up on any page total unless you specifically go to the Backup page. The whole implementation and UI of it is, well, shocking.

I'd be tempted to do a quick audit of staff and ask who has set that up and see if its possible to disable at Team level.

BillyG

Thank you for that suggestion. As the admin of the Team I expect to have complete visibility of the space I am paying a decent sum of money for.
Besides going to each of the 100 users computers and checking the "BACKUPS" page link, is there a way as admin, that I can see if anyone is using this feature? Even better if I could disable this all together?

Rich

@BillyG wrote:
Even better if I could disable this all together?

https://help.dropbox.com/organize/manage-team-backup

BillyG

Thanks Rich,

When disabling Backup in settings I was shown a prompt saying existing Backups wont be disabled or removed. Is it possible to get a list of users that have made use of this feature so that we can assist them in removing it (if this is the case)?

Megan

Hi @BillyG, I hope you're doing well!

In the Help Center article that Rich provided above, you can follow the steps mentioned there, in order for you to manage Backups, and check who has the feature enabled or disabled on their end.

You'd need to go through that info, and gather the names of the members that currently use the feature.

I hope this clarifies.

BillyG

Thanks for pointing that out. I have extracted a list of 5 members that show Backup activity since we signed up for dropbox and have removed all backup related storage and disabled the backup feature.

With this done, I am still faced with the same issue... dropbox admin shows 6.9TB total, but summing up all users and content sizes only add up to 3TB as per my calculations.

Walter

Hi @BillyG, could you clarify where exactly you are looking to calculate your members' accounts storage?

The backup of each member would be in their personal folders so it wouldn't be accounted for in the team or shared content.

BillyG

Hi @Walter ,

For "Backups" I pulled a list of user activity as per the shared link in the previous post. this revealed +-5 Users who "may" have used Backups. I then went to each user and checked on their machine via the https://www.dropbox.com/backups/all link and confirmed all backup was removed.

In terms of how I calculate Space Used: Via Admin Console->Members: Order list by usage then sum up until I reach users with less than 1GB, I get +-3.2TB

Then for shared folders via Admin Console -> Content: The Team and shared list (add size to table) then order by size and sum the list : I get +-22GB

Clearly these two account for around 3.222TB but Admin Console -> Insights, The Team Overview section says "Space used" = 6.9TB. Dropbox therefore only allows me to be on the Advanced plan (as im over 5TB) however I feel I should be on the standard plan as I can only account for 3.222TB (less than the 5TB threshold)

Is their possibly something else Im missing?

Walter

Do you happen to have a lot of licences on your team account @BillyG?

Can you maybe check from the members tab to see if there's a member of the team that's showing high storage usage?

You can do this by clicking on the column header twice as this would sort the members from largest to smallest.

BillyG

Hey @Walter

We have around 115 licenses on our team.

As per my previous post:
"In terms of how I calculate Space Used: Via Admin Console->Members: Order list by usage then sum up until I reach users with less than 1GB, I get +-3.2TB"

Yes, One member who we are aware of accounts for 2.5TB of this 3.2TB total, two users has +-100GB and the remaining however 90% of the users are well below 10GB.

Hannah

Hey @BillyG, thanks for looking into this and for the additional info.

Can we reach out to you via email, so we can have a look at this internally?

BillyG

Hi @Hannah

Any assistance will be highly appreciated. I have a few support tickets that was created over the period. The latest of which is under ref 20504119.

What is really problematic is that for months no one ("engineers", "advanced support") from Dropbox can account for the storage use the system is indicating. Due to this I have been forced to move to "advanced" plan (as my team needed to work) costing me an additional $2500 pm which is not sustainable for my business. I have started the process of considering alternatives due to this issue. Dropbox seems un-phased loosing a loyal customer for many years as they forcing me to pay for there "investigations" which I simply cannot do.