Sharing files with friends and colleagues is extremely simple. This tells Dropbox to look for other PCs on your local network which have the same synced Dropbox folders, and instead of downloading these files from the internet it will send them via your network, shaving off more megabytes from your usage allowance and allowing everything to sync up much more quickly. For instance, if you never use your work laptop for your personal photography files, you can stop those files from taking up space on your laptop hard disk and stop Dropbox from wasting bandwidth by downloading files you don't need.Īnother way to save bandwidth is to enable LAN Sync. Selective Sync is also a very handy tool this allows you to only download the contents of specific folders onto any given PC. Download and upload throttling is the most important, as it prevents Dropbox from hogging all your bandwidth when syncing a large number of files. The Dropbox desktop application is simple to use, but has some powerful tools to help you conserve bandwidth. If you like files to be stored in a specific place in your Documents folder, you could always create a shortcut to your Dropbox from that folder. It will only synchronise files stored in the Dropbox directory, meaning that you'll need to make sure all the documents, images and other files you want to access are placed there. The desktop application for Dropbox works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you're uploading from the web interface, the maximum file size is 10GB, which is still very generous.

Spending £7.99 per month (£79 per year) on Dropbox Pro gets you a huge 1TB of storage, which is a very generous allowance which puts it just behind Google Drive in terms of cost per gigabyte.įile upload and download limits are generous if you're uploading from the desktop app there's no limit to the size of the files you can upload, as long as they don't exceed your storage limit. Dropbox is a synchronisation rather than backup service, meaning that while you can use it for backing up important files, its real selling point is the ability to access any of your important files from wherever you are, on any device.Ī basic free account with no bonus storage (which you can get for fulfilling various tasks such as referring friends or uploading photos to the service) comes with 2GB of space.

What is dropbox review