How Much Free Space on Dropbox Do I Have, and What Eats It

Two gigabytes is the whole of the free space on Dropbox a Basic account ever gets, and Dropbox puts it in one line on its plan page: Basic is a free plan that offers 2 GB of space. Everything else about this question is about what eats those two gigabytes and what happens when they run out.

Where the real free space on Dropbox figure lives

On the website, and reliably nowhere else:

Sign in at dropbox.com.
Click your avatar at the top right.
Click Manage account.
Under Subscriptions, read the storage bar.

Business plans sit somewhere else entirely. There the avatar is at the bottom left, and the route runs through Settings and then Plan.

The desktop app is the trap. It has a panel called Sync and storage, reached from the Dropbox icon in the taskbar or menu bar, then your avatar at the bottom left. Read what it measures before you trust it: Dropbox describes that dashboard as showing sync status, disk usage and any issues, and disk usage means the hard drive in your computer. It answers a different question from the one you asked. For the account figure, use the website.

What the bar is counting

Five bands, and two of them surprise people:

Regular files. Files and folders in your account that are not shared.
Shared files. Storage used by shared files and folders that you have joined.
Unused space. Whatever is left.
Backup. Space used by Dropbox Backup.
Replay. Space used by Dropbox Replay.

The second band is where a 2 GB account quietly dies. Join a shared folder and its contents count against your quota, not only against the quota of whoever created it. Dropbox draws the line at joining: shared folders that you have not joined do not count towards your used storage space. So the fix for a full Basic account is often not deleting your own files at all. It is leaving a folder somebody invited you into three years ago.

What happens when you go over

This is the part the tutorials skip, and it is the reason to check the number before it matters.

Dropbox says you may lose the ability to sync, upload, share, move or preview files and folders. Files you have already downloaded to a computer or phone stay where they are.

Then it starts removing things. Dropbox deletes least recently modified files first, until the account is under the limit, and only files you own. Shared folders you do not own are removed from your account without their contents being deleted. Shared folders you do own are also removed from yours, and the other members keep their access. You get notified more than once before any of this happens, and deleted files can be recovered for 30 days.

Read that sequence twice. The oldest thing you own is the first thing to go, which is the exact inverse of how most people would choose.

The check worth doing once a year

I would run it before a large upload rather than after a sync stalls. Two minutes on the website, in this order. Read the bar. If Shared files is a large slice, open your shared folders and leave the ones you no longer work in. If Backup is a large slice, decide whether you still want that machine backed up. Only then start looking at your own files, because on a 2 GB plan your own files are rarely the biggest number on the bar.

Where the real free space on Dropbox figure lives

What the bar is counting

What happens when you go over

The check worth doing once a year

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