Child Item

Also Lost Earned Space - Please help?

Our agency has been successfully using Dropbox for about 11 years. Over that time, we'd added several clients, resulting in "earned storage space". A couple months ago I suddenly lost all of that extra space and am limited to the original free storage amount. We'd never before had a storage problem as we keep files cleaned up. Yet I went through the account with a fine-toothed comb and removed anything slightly extraneous. There still is not enough space for our needs after the mysterious change occurred. Can someone please help me understand what happened and, more importantly, how to get our earned space back?

Find more posts tagged with

Storage space

Referrals

Accepted answers

Jay

If the quota hasn't freed up, then it sounds like it hasn't been deleted fully from the site, could you check again to see if it's still visible on the backup page and try deleting it again?

All comments

Sue-PSC

I've checked my Referrals page and it shows I've earned 2.75gb bonus space, but it's not appearing on my account.

Sue-PSC

Sorry - it IS appearing on my account, but I previously had more storage. This is becoming confusing. I know it was allowing us to share much more information prior to April 24, and now it's extremely limited, but I couldn't find anything in Events that indicated anything that would affect the storage. Sorry if this is confusing. I couldn't find a way to edit my first reply.

Jay

Hi @Sue-PSC, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Are you certain you're logged into the correct account with the referral quota? How many referrals did you earn in total according to this page?

Is it possible you had any promotional quota which has since expired, which is visible on the referrals page as well?

This will help me to assist further!

Sue-PSC

Hi Jay, thanks for reaching out. I checked Referrals and it indicates one expiration of 25gb in 2018, so nothing that would affect this situation.

I will try to clarify as much as I know. Sometime around the last 2 weeks of April this year we began having file sharing issues where the info I would share with my team wouldn't show up in their Dropbox folders. To be clear - I'd done nothing different than we had been doing the last 12 years, but I was in the midst of recovering from a personal computer crash. I only have the one Dropbox account so I don't believe I could have signed into a different account.

Additionally, with the problems we were experiencing I cleaned absolutely everything out of my folders that were stored, but weren't essential shared files which we modify daily. We have continued to struggle with limited space since that timeframe. It's becoming problematic enough that my whole team will need to look for a different file sharing solution in a matter of days/weeks unless someone can figure out what happened to change the storage we obviously used to have. I couldn't find anywhere to look at storage history to see if I could find a glitch there but wasn't able to find anything that allows me to see our storage history.

Dropbox has been such a great resource that I dislike having to look for alternatives, so if you can figure out this mystery Jay, we'd be very grateful.

Jay

Is it possible that you have a backup running on your Dropbox account, which would take up quota?

Sue-PSC

Hi Jay,

That may be possible, but I can't tell from that screen. I took a screenshot of the link you gave me. How can I send it to you?

Jay

You can paste the screenshot in your next reply, or by clicking the camera icon to attach the image.

The backup page would show any kind of backup running on your device. If you're not certain, this page will show the breakdown of your quota, including backups.

Sue-PSC

Jay, I think you've touched on something here! This is what is showing up on the Subscriptions page

Regular files (1.6 MB)

Backup (3.5 GB)

Shared Files (1.3 GB)

Plus you can see the backup impact on my account in this screenshot. How do I remedy this?

Dropbox Backup - Screenshot 2023-06-22 112456.jpg

Shared files (1.3 GB)

Jay

Yes, it looks like you have a backup taking up 3.46 GB on your account. You can delete it from the site by following these steps.

Sue-PSC

Oh my gosh, thank you!

Sorry to be a pain, but I have a question. I left-clicked the app icon on my Windows screen and found Backup to Dropbox. Opening that I'm in Dropbox Backup (Beta). This allows me to Manage Backup. I turned off Automatic Backups. Is this enough, or should I now click Delete you "name" backup? If I click that, will all my files still be in my account Dropbox folders?

Sue-PSC

Jay, after turning off the backup (was a passport backup), I then clicked the Delete (passport) backup. It no longer shows up on my Backup page, but I still have the same storage error message. Is there an amount of time for this to clear itself up and restore my account?

Jay

If the quota hasn't freed up, then it sounds like it hasn't been deleted fully from the site, could you check again to see if it's still visible on the backup page and try deleting it again?

Sue-PSC

Ooh, thank you! It did show an error in deleting it. I was able to delete it this time and everything looks right with the world again! Jay, many thanks for your patience and assistance. I'm thrilled with being able to continue using Dropbox!

Jay

No worries, glad to have helped out.

Enjoy the rest of your week!