Dropbox Basic: Let's Maximize Space

Try to think of your Dropbox cloud storage as a well organized bedroom. In order to maximize space, you want to be thoughtful about how you use each closet and section of the room. With your Dropbox Basic account you have 2 GB of storage. With this amount of storage its imperative that you are thoughtful about the files you save to your Dropbox account.

If you know more about files sizes, you can make more informed decisions about which files you upload. In this article you will get a better understanding of how to maximize space with your Basic Dropbox account. What are the average file sizes of media we use daily?

Images

Many of use Dropbox to upload images, which come in several formats and sizes. These formats affect the amount of space the image may take up. Photos from our computers are usually in formats such as JPEG and PNG. This is great because these images often don’t take up as much space as larger format files.

Image formatting (as in the space it takes up, not the dimensions of the photo itself) is based on resolution and quality of the pictures. I know this because I uploaded each type of image to my Dropbox Account and saw that the quality and difference in resolution affected the overall size. Larger pictures, such as raw camera footage (TIFF and BMP), should be converted to JPEG before uploading to your dropbox account. The rationale here is so that you save about 1000kB of space.

Average Image Size

Documents

Documents overall take up the least amount of space. With your Basic account, you can save about 25,000 pages of word documents, depending on file size. If you use documents for planning and collaboration, I suggest you try using Dropbox Paper. Paper documents take up very little space on Dropbox. I would suggest placing homework assignments and projects that you may always need access to on your Dropbox account. I am currently working on creating my dissertation and have it saved on Dropbox - this document is super important to me and I need to ensure that I can access it from all of my devices.

Document File Sizes

Media Files

Video is the largest file format but that doesn’t mean you can’t store video files in your Dropbox Basic account. To make the video more compact you can use an online compressor, or, like I’ve done in the past, edit the videos to make them shorter. I have also experimented with changing the format of the video to reduce file size.

Media File Sizes

Remember to treat your Dropbox like your well organized bedroom. You want to shrink larger items if you can and want to organize items that you know do not take up much space. I use my Dropbox account to hold my important documents, vacation photos and files from Dropbox Paper. Now that I know how much space each file takes up, I do my best to maximize my space.

Let’s maximize our space by using the tips and tricks above - and if you have any other space saving tips, share them in the comments below!