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
- Click on the Dropbox icon in the Windows taskbar.
- Click on your account profile icon and click Preferences.
- Navigate to the Sync tab.
- Make sure to enable Save hard drive space automatically and set the Default sync preference to Online-only.
Enabling Save hard drive space automatically lets Dropbox remove unused files from your local drive, freeing space while keeping projects accessible. When you open a cloud-stored project in Virtual Surveyor, Dropbox downloads it instantly. This way, you benefit from both Virtual Surveyor’s desktop performance and Dropbox’s cloud storage.
For files added on the web, set the default to Online-only. This ensures shared files stay in the cloud until you open them in Virtual Surveyor. It’s especially important in team spaces—if set to Local, your computer and network could be overloaded with terabytes of data immediately.
Admin console
Admins for Dropbox team accounts can set this setting to the default for their organization in the Admin Console through Settings > Sync.
