Dropbox full because of shared folder

It simply makes no sense that a folder someone shares with you counts towards your quota. It's their folder, their quota. Defeats the purpose of shared folders. Still, I have 45 GB of free storage on OneDrive. I'll just get my mates who shared their folder with me to go to OneDrive too. OneDrive isn't retarded like DB with the way their shared folders work.

@Mark Mc

But this is not how they charge for the service - DB charges by space, not by access or downloads. I can also share a link to a file or folder (from a free account) to give people access, who don't even need a DB account to download the files- no bandwidth or access charges for them!

So, to repeat what @Andrew R said, 'it simply makes no sense' to charge this way, and it places really quite severe limits on what would otherwise be a useful service.

I only keep free 5.25GB account for when people want to share stuff with me on DropBox (unfortunately, too often!). I have to constantly decide which shares to remove in order to let me save files and update files. This need to manage who has shared their space with me sometimes leads to to remove shared folders before I'm really done with them, and then ask for a new share when I come back to that project. It just sucks.

Mark:

Dacia doesn't pull a bait-and-switch in their fine print outlining that yes, the car has power steering and an FM radio, but they designed a custom electrical system that more efficiently uses energy, and as a result you can't use the power steering while the radio is on. Sure, the documentation is available if you look for it, and the sales person likely has knowledge of the limitation, but if you hop online to various car enthusiast forums you'd find threads started by owners just finding out about the limitation after nearly crashing on the road because they wanted some music. You'd also find Porsche owners pointing those who complain right to the documentation and telling them to RTFM, and others still that tell them to get a different car if they're not happy with the one they have.

No one is saying Dropbox isn't within their legal right to act this way. We're saying it's a really sleazy thing to do, limiting what is perceived to be a conceptually simple feature in some non-intuitive way without being upfront about it.

Also, this doesn't just affect free users; a Dropbox Pro user would run into this issue as well with enough data.

@Mark MC somebody's expectations have everything to do with it! That is what this thread is all about: people's expectations of how the service should work. Granted, you are correct in that people have made an incorrect assumption that Dropbox won't use their personal quota when someone shares a folder with them, but the point is most people make that assumption; this is how the majority expect the service to work.

Most services try to meet their users' expectations, Dropbox is not doing that with the way they treat shared folders and personal quotas. Customers have every right to be annoyed with a provider that doesn't listen to their demands. Good businesses try to satisfy their customers. Sure, people can go somewhere else, and I am sure that's what most of Dropbox's annoyed customers have done. I use OneDrive and Google Drive now instead of Dropbox. But what kind of a business model is that? Ignore your dissatisfied customers and tell them to go and use a different service? I can't believe you would be an advocate of that kind of simple-minded suggestion.

Dave, Mark Mc, Alexis G and Rich R have made it very clear that Dropbox doesn’t care what the users think.  They will use their unique way of counting to charge, and they think that is correct.  They think Dropbox have spent a lot of cost and effort to set up the service and they won’t be listening to the users’ honest feedback, and Dropbox won’t be able to do anything about it.  Dropbox doesn’t charge by ownership space.  Instead they charge by happenstance unrequested accessibility.  Rigid, uninventive and unconcerned about users’ feedback is what they try to convey.  We should understand their statements and accept that is Dropbox.

They are however very imaginative in creating explanations on how Dropbox should multi-charge on each shared file that has just one copy on their server.

the Web o.: Your entire poorly-written reply comes across as arrogant, condescending, and smug. We already understand how shared folders affect storage quotas. The problem is that this behavior is both (1) utterly non-intuitive and (2) never explained to the user.

Even those with technical knowledge have complained in this tread, myself among them. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how well the user understands the underlying technology because Dropbox accounts are marketed at a given capacity of storage.

You don't seem to grasp that this problem extends to paid users as well. For example: Alice signs up for a Dropbox Pro account, giving her a total storage capacity of 1 TB. She has paid for this space, and is happily using it without problems. She brings in Bob, a Dropbox Basic user, to collaborate with her on a project. Alice creates a folder and shares it with Bob, and they're all set...until the files in Alice's shared folder exceed the free space in Bob's own Dropbox and his ability to sync anything is revoked. Why, though? Alice paid for the extra space, so Bob shouldn't have to.

At no point, during the process of sharing or joining a folder, is the user made aware of the fact that files in that folder will count against the storage quotas of all users involved.

The problem at hand isn't that we think this should change (although some of us do have that opinion), it's that this behavior is counter to the overwhelming majority of users' expectations, and by not making an active effort to inform them of this, Dropbox is failing to properly communicate to its customers. I'll prove it: this thread exists.

the Web o.: A personal attack would be to insult someone based on qualities they themselves lack or posses, e.g. calling someone a troll. My comment was aimed at your words, not you, and I'll back my assessment up.

1. condescending: You are doing exactly what I pointed out was wrong with this thread a whole page ago. We already understand what happens to storage quotas when you share folders. We do not need you to explain that to us.
2. arrogant: Your insistence on explaining what we already understand instead of addressing our complaints suggests a lack of comprehension of the actual problem.
3. smug: You literally ended your message by laughing at us.

Now, in reply to your next posts:

Who said anything about ISP's? This is about Dropbox; stay on subject. In any case, of course Bob still pays his ISP to download those files. The example still points out that Alice has paid for the storage of those files on Dropbox's servers, so why should Bob have to? Dropbox is marketed by capacity of storage, and touts "simple file sharing." You might have a point if the marketing was done by data throughput, but it isn't.

The very real, legitimate complaint here is that users are not ever made aware that the files within shared folders count against the storage quotas of every user with access. Regardless of the technical reasons for this, it's not intuitive and it confuses users who hit their storage quota because of shared folders they joined.

Explanations about deduplication, bandwidth costs, file systems... It's all irrelevant because users are expecting a certain behavior. Operating counter to that expectation shouldn't just be documented; it should be communicated to the user during the folder sharing and joining processes.

"dont like it, use another cloud provider": This is exactly why this complaint matters. People are leaving. Paying customers are leaving. This complaint isn't about getting more space out of Dropbox for free; it's about improving the experience so that threads like this one aren't necessary. All Dropbox has to do is just tell users how storage quotas are affected when they share or join a folder. That's it. It's so simple, and yet it isn't done. That is our complaint.

Edit: Good job closing a thread of legitimate complaints, guys. Just a fantastic way to run things.

What an amazing amount of hot air in this thread.  Sound and fury signifying nothing....  Anyway, thanks to Derek for getting back to what matters and posting that informative link.  As others have expressed, this shared folder behavior is quite antiquated in its limitations and I have moved on to OneDrive and Google Drive as my only paid subscription services for the moment.  Still, I regularly get asked to join shared folders on Dropbox when what the other party really needs to do is send a File Request: https://www.dropbox.com/help/files-folders/create-file-request  Lots of people misunderstand how this system works and what its limitations are.

I agree with the people who have posted here.  I don't understand why dropbox charges me for data that is in other people's account who have shared their folder with me.  As a church we use dropbox to transfer files created at home to our church computers.  This works well for large files ... then after we access and save the data saved to our church computers we clean out the dropbox.  We recently were joined with another user that pays for larger data storage.  Within minutes, because we have the limited free account our dropbox was full and we were unable to load anything more.  We only needed to access a few of the files that were stored in the other person's shared folder.  But dropbox said that data also belonged to our dropbox.  Seems like double charging of data to me.  So we had to create another email address and access this folder only via dropbox.com and not from the app on the computer.