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Forum Discussion
Dropbox limits on zipped files preventing downloading as backup to external drive.
Have ~1.5 TB of files on Dropbox that I'm trying to backup to an external hard drive.
My initial plan was to copy the local Dropbox folder from my PC to the external drive. However, I'd previously enabled DropBox's SmartSync, which effectively replaced local files with shortcuts to the files in the cloud (to free up disk space). I'm pretty sure that copying the directory will now only copy the shortcuts rather than the actual files located on the cloud, the latter of which I'd like to copy.
To ensure that I copy the actual files to the external drive, I tried to download my entire Dropbox folder from the Dropbox.com site. This produced the error: "Attempted to zip too many files." This is puzzling since Dropbox Basic has 100k file downloads and 20GB bandwidth limits, but as a Dropbox Plus user I should have 1TB of bandwidth and unlimited downloads. Even after trying to download a <1 TB-sized subdirectory, I still received the error. There also appear to be conflicting reports about download file number and size limits.
Any ideas on how to download all of my data from Dropbox to an external disk? I don't even know what Dropbox's zip limits.
- Rich
Super User II
secret_username1 wrote:
Any ideas on how to download all of my data from Dropbox to an external disk? I don't even know what Dropbox's zip limits.
Downloading a folder as a Zip file has a limit of 250GB and fewer than 10,000 files. If either of those limits are reached, Dropbox will be unable to create the Zip file.
You'll either need to download in smaller batches, or allow the files to sync to your computer so you can move them to the external drive using Explorer.
The limits only apply to Dropbox Basic, no? From here:
"Dropbox Plus, Family, Professional, and Standard: 1 TB of bandwidth and unlimited file downloads per day."
Can you point me to where I should go to allow the files to be on my local machine? No clear way to do this en masse given I have hundreds of thousands of files in deeply nested directories.
- Rich
secret_username1 wrote:
The limits only apply to Dropbox Basic, no? From here:
"Dropbox Plus, Family, Professional, and Standard: 1 TB of bandwidth and unlimited file downloads per day."
You're confusing different features. That line refers to shared links, not the process of downloading a folder as a Zip file.
Can you point me to where I should go to allow the files to be on my local machine?Right-click on a file or folder (or select multiple and right-click) and select Make available offline. Keep in mind that with that many files, it will take a long time for Dropbox to sync everything back down to your computer. I recently marked a couple hundred thousand files as Online-only and it took a couple of hours. Be patient and let it work.
