My storage is full, and it seems to be calculating shared content as my own

Question

After years of using Dropbox with this account, I've just  received an email all of a sudden saying "Your dropbox is full" with a 59 days deadline.

When i log in i see "Your Personal Dropbox account is full".

Unlike before, now it lists around  20 GB of shared files that were shared to my account  that are owned by another account:

Your Personal Dropbox account is full

Using 22.4 GB of 5.24 GB

Regular files (1.7 MB)Backup (0 bytes)Replay (0 bytes)Shared files (22.4 GB)

The email I got as well as language in the website states that if i dont' start to pay up my files would get deleted.

I can't seem to find a way to contact support about this.

Why is this happening?

Since when do storage gets added to the allocation calculation of both the owner AND the users it has been shared to? Is this something new? Is this a mistake?

How do I fix this so it won't charge me and the other account twice for the same files?

Jay · Accepted Answer

Hi @AdventuerMobOded, thanks for messaging today.

As you've discovered, shared folders do take up quota on all accounts that have added those folders to their accounts, if you're not on a Dropbox team plan of Family plan (in which the shared folder only counts once). This has always been the case since the beginning, so there hasn't been any recent changes to how it works.

You can read up more about this in this article on the site.

This policy exists to prevent people from giving themselves unlimited storage space by stacking accounts and shared folders.

If you'd like to share a folder without impacting the recipient's quota, you can share a link to the folder instead, which creates a one-way, read-only copy of the folder.

Otherwise, if you want others to upload files to your Dropbox account without impacting the submitters quota, you can send a file request.

If you need any further assistance, please let me know!