Drone surveying produces very large files, and consequently Virtual Surveyor projects quickly consume a lot of space. You typically don't want all those files on your computer. You only want the projects that you are currently working on to be available locally. The rest can stay on the Dropbox cloud. 


This article describes the optimal Dropbox settings to achieve this. They are also the Dropbox default settings.


Dropbox Desktop App

  1. Click on the Dropbox icon in the Windows taskbar.
  2. Click on your account icon and then click Preferences.
  3. Navigate to the Sync tab.
  4. Make sure to have Save hard drive space automatically to On and Files added on web default: Online-only.


Setting Save hard drive space automatically to On assures that Dropbox removes files from your local drive when you don't use them frequently or when you are running out of disc space on your local machine. You can still open these projects in Virtual Surveyor once Dropbox moves them to the cloud. Virtual Surveyor will instantly start downloading them when you open projects stored in the cloud. Using the Dropbox cloud, you can combine the advantages of both the Virtual Surveyor desktop and the advantages of the Dropbox cloud.


Files added on web default: Online-only means that files that are shared with you stay in the cloud until you use them. They are only downloaded when you open them in Virtual Surveyor. This is most important when you are added to a team space. If this setting is not set to Online-only, but to Local, then your computer and network might become flooded with Terrabytes of data as soon as you are added to a team space.


Admin console

Admins for Dropbox team accounts can set this setting to the default for their organization in the Admin Console through Settings > Sync.