Dropbox gives you 100 GB of data! Great! Oh, but now it’s also on my hard drives. Hmm.

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I figured it long after I had every single folder, file, photo and old shared garbage on several computers. Syncing files is wonderful until you don’t want all of those folders on all of your computers.

Choose only the folders you want to sync with each computer.

Choose only the folders you want to sync with each computer.

Up in the button bar at the top of your Mac (or bottom right for your PC), find your Dropbox icon. Find a little gear looking icon for settings and then Preferences. From there, it’s Account, then Selective Sync. From here, uncheck all of the folders you don’t want on that computer.

[box type=”info”]Not to worry, you’re not deleting the folder entirely, it’s still online at Dropbox, you’re just removing it from this computer.[/box]
Choose only the folders you want to sync.

Choose only the folders you want to sync.

You can always recheck the box later and the folders and files will be resynced with your computer. When, finally, someday, you realize that you really don’t need certain folders anywhere any longer, you can then delete them from Dropbox or from your computer and they’ll be gone forever. Careful if those are shared folders as they’ll be deleted from the other people’s computers, too.

  1. Click Dropbox icon.
  2. Find gear icon (settings)
  3. Click Preferences
  4. Account
  5. Selective Sync
  6. Uncheck folders

Computer slowing down? It might be that Dropbox has a ton of files on your computer.

Sure, it’s all in the cloud, happily not taking up space on your local drive, right? Not so fast. It’s also on your local computer, that’s the beauty of syncing. If your computer is filling up with too many files, check your Dropbox file status and see how many gigabytes you’re syncing that you may want to unsync.

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