It is a premium feature, though, available only for paid plans. Plus, while many cloud storage services leave chunky files on your computer, Dropbox has a nifty option on both Windows and Mac called Smart Sync that lets you leave all those files online, helping you free up that much-needed hard drive space. Right-click that folder and select Smart Sync > Local from the menu: Find the folder that you would like to change.Click the folder icon in the upper right:.Click the Dropbox tray icon ( ) to open the Dropbox menu.The convenience of being able to see and access these files without storing them on your hard drive is immense. Furthermore, Smart Sync is perfect for you if a lot of users share files with you. When should you use Smart Sync? Consider Smart Sync when you have a large amount of files stored in your Dropbox. Online-only files take up minimal space on your hard drive: only saving the file name, location and last updated date. File and Folder names will appear in your local Dropbox folder.

I un-sync some files manually to save space on my local hard drive, but they are files (mostly images) that I only need to access very infrequently – as in maybe, never.15 How much does Dropbox Smart Sync cost? What is Dropbox Smart Sync Local vs online?ĭropbox Smart Sync allows you to select files or folders to be stored locally on your device or in the cloud (online-only). I didn’t know that ‘online-only’ files related to Smart Sync. You can choose which files to make online-only or let automatic Smart Sync choose for you.” “Smart Sync is a feature of the Dropbox desktop app that allows you to make files online-only so you can save hard drive space on your computer. That was the clue, and Support then told me that the email had to do with the Smart Sync feature and files that are set to Online-only using the feature, and this will not effect files that have been selected using the Selective Sync feature. I said that any files I had un-synced didn’t show at all in my local Dropbox.

I asked Dropbox Support about it and Support said that such files are identifiable by the download cloud icon. They said though that I would still be able to open Dropbox files by double-clicking them in Finder. They said that Dropbox doesn’t have full support for online-only files yet, and that some apps might have trouble opening Dropbox files while they’re online-only. I received an email from Dropbox saying they were reaching out with an update about Dropbox on the upcoming macOS 12.3 release.

Dropbox smart sync vs selective sync