My files in my Dropbox folder have cloud icons, how can I get them local on my Mac?

Question

Hi!

I have been a paying client of Dropbox for several years and must now opt out of this. Actually, that happened automatically when I forgot to update my card number and was, therefore, downgraded.

So now, I have files representing 8,000 percent or some outrageous number of what I can have as a non-paying customer. My Mac has about 800GB of files out of a 1TB drive. And it used to show about 200GB of free space.

Oddly enough, the moment my subscription did not renew, and I have no idea whether it is a coincidence or not, I now have 500GB of free space. That is to say about 300GB are offline. And I never asked for that. And that happened in about 24 hours.

Also, when looking at the folder hierarchy, there are tons of incoherences: a folder will show a little cloud (meaning, the thing is queued for upload, so definitely offline), but then when I look inside the folder, many files have the cloud with the little arrow pointing downward (only online). That happens all over my dropbox folder that lives in the right place and I never touch it, or tweak the dropbox app setting because everytime I do, weird thing start happening and suck up my time at a high rate.

So I am puzzled.

I still want to downgrade, but I have no clue why my files are dancing up and down without me telling them to do anything, while some folders cannot be moved, but their content can. I feel like I am dispossessed of my files and that is not a nice feeling. Would someone have a solution that does not look like "sorry sir, but you will have to renew your subscription in order to access your files". Or maybe, just maybe, am I getting paranoid? 🙂

Jay · Accepted Answer

Hi @stephbg, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

When your account is over quota after you downgrade, it isn't possible to add, edit or move any files in your account, since these changes wouldn't sync. The only option would be to delete files from your account to free up quota, or to upgrade.

Regarding your query, you can right click the Dropbox folder and mark it as available offline for the files to download to your machine in order to have the local copies, so you can move them out of the Dropbox folder.

Bear in mind that if your account remains over quota, then your files would be subject to data deletion, on which you can find more information in this article.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.