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Forum Discussion
Archiving files in Dropbox
Hi I am trying to figure out how to archive Dropbox files and I am reading conflicting information. Some posts say you can archive files in dropbox and other posts say not. Anyone know the answer?
I've read the Dropbox help and that isn't massively clear tbh 😞
Thanks
Hi, I'm Zachary. I'm an engineer here at Dropbox.
That's right stevedropbox, Dropbox doesn't inherently support "archiving" files. On the other hand, you can definitely make your own "Archive" folder.
I'd love to hear about why you want to achive things, so we can learn about what features to build in the future. Do you want to free up space, reduce clutter to help find things, or something else?
If you're worried about space, you can use selective sync to avoid certain folders taking up space on your hard drive. Or, if you're a business user, you can use the much better Smart Sync feature, which gives many of the space-saving benefits of archiving without all the manual management.
If you're unable to find things, I'm curious what your experience with our search functioanlity has been--has it helped at all?
- Rich
Super User II
What do you mean by archiving files? Dropbox, when installed on your computer, is just a folder like any other. Any files you move into the Dropbox folder are copied into your account online. Any changes you make in that folder or in your account online are then synced back and forth. Dropbox is not an archive or backup service.
You'll need to explain what it is you're trying to accoomplish before we'll be able to point you in the right direction.
There is no way that I know of where a user can "archive" Dropbox files in the traditional sense, either from their personal computer or the Internet web service, so you may be out of luck.
What I think you are reading about online which is a cause of confusion for many is that many blogsters and techie people write articles touting the ability to archive Dropbox files (i.e. http://freedompodcasting.com/archive-dropbox-files-filling-hard-drive/) but in reality these articles just describe the process of Selective Syncing files, whereby you computer uploader will only sync certain folders to the web service.
Best of luck to you and if this helpd I'd really appreciate a Kudo or Accepted as Solution. Thanks and have a great day.
ZavDropbox Staff
Hi, I'm Zachary. I'm an engineer here at Dropbox.
That's right stevedropbox, Dropbox doesn't inherently support "archiving" files. On the other hand, you can definitely make your own "Archive" folder.
I'd love to hear about why you want to achive things, so we can learn about what features to build in the future. Do you want to free up space, reduce clutter to help find things, or something else?
If you're worried about space, you can use selective sync to avoid certain folders taking up space on your hard drive. Or, if you're a business user, you can use the much better Smart Sync feature, which gives many of the space-saving benefits of archiving without all the manual management.
If you're unable to find things, I'm curious what your experience with our search functioanlity has been--has it helped at all?
As a user that has over 5000 clients we use selective syncing.
Our folder structure is
Current - Client - Finance year - docs
Archive - Client - Finance year - docs
The archive folder is used to move old financial year folders where regaurlar access is not required (Eg for docs older than say 3 years).
We do this to improve the syncing time as we have millions of documents. It would be great to have a function to either bulk archive folders or even documents based on age eg greater than 3 years or in our case names eg 2016 folders.
