Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Beginner’s Guide to Dropbox for Mac – Cloud Storage”.
This is the beginner’s guide to Dropbox for Mac, and Dropbox is a really handy service that gives you some storage space in the cloud and anything that you put in that storage space can be synced to all of your devices. If you choose to do that, and this video will show you everything you need to know to get started using Dropbox. So here I am on Dropbox comm and, as I browse down the page, you can see some of the features and benefits of Dropbox. It is great for keeping your files organized and synced across all your devices. For me, that’s really. The most important thing about Dropbox is: if I put a document into Dropbox, I can access it and use it wherever I am.
It also does have some good collaboration features and we’ll look at one or two of those in this article. So let’s get started right now. Learning how to use Dropbox and Dropbox has a couple of ways that you can sign up and start using their product. One way to do that is to click the sign up button put in some basic information and then click sign up. You can also sign up with Google, which will let you sign into your Dropbox account using your Google account.
So that is one way to get signed up to use. Dropbox just use this button here, but instead I’m gon na point out that, at least at this point in time at the very bottom of the Dropbox comm page, they do have a button for getting Dropbox. For solo workers for individuals basically, and then they also have a button for Dropbox business, for businesses and teams etc, and I’m gon na click. This button get Dropbox and the reason for this is because it does illustrate some of the options that you have available. If I browse down the page here, it shows the options that I have.
I could get a free basic account that gives me two gigabytes of storage space in the cloud I could pay $ 12 a month and in addition to what I get here in the basic account, I would get two terabytes of storage space and some other great Options and then there’s a professional account too now, if you’re disappointed in the amount of space provided in the free account, don’t worry about that. There are some great ways that you can increase that amount for free, we’ll look at that a little bit later, so i’m gon na click sign up for a free basic account, and it opens up that same panel that i showed a few minutes ago, and i Can just put in my information and click sign up, give me a minute to do so and then i’ll resume the tutorial all right. Now that i’ve set up my account. The next thing dropbox wants me to do is to download dropbox, and that can be a little confusing at first. But basically, even though dropbox gives me storage space in the cloud, I do need to download a little program called Dropbox install it on my computer, and that makes it really easy to access my files and folders that are in the cloud.
So I’ll click download Dropbox. It puts a copy of it on my computer and the browser I’m using is Google Chrome and so by default it puts my downloads in the Downloads folder. For you, it will probably work the same way, but if not just figure out where that downloaded to and then click to open it up. I’Ll just click on that, and that opens this installation box and I can just double click: the icon to install Dropbox on my computer.
Now my Mac is trying to protect me here. It knows that this Dropbox application came from the Internet. Sometimes that might be a concern, but I do trust Dropbox, and so I’m gon na go ahead and click open, and it’s now installing Dropbox onto this computer. This can take a little while to do.
Ok, Dropbox has successfully been installed on my computer, and you can see up here at the top. There is the Dropbox icon and from now on, whenever I’m on this computer Dropbox should automatically run and appear here at the top. Now, if it’s grayed out like it is right now that means one of two things: either I’m not signed in to my account, which is true in this case, or I might not be connected to the Internet. So just be aware of that.
If you ever see this grayed out the way it is you’re – probably not fully connected to the Internet at that moment. For now, though, I just need to sign in to my account so I’ll put in that same email address that I used to sign up for the account and the same password, and now I have successfully not only install Dropbox but signed into it. There are some Advanced Settings here that you can play with. If you would like, for example, you can change the location of your Dropbox folder now the only reason I can think of to do this is, if you have two hard drives.
I have a computer that has just a basic hard drive and then it’s got a secondary, hard drive, that’s huge, and if I wanted to, I could install Dropbox on that secondary drive, that’s really big, and that way I could put lots of files and folders and Documents into that and it wouldn’t bother my main primary drive. So that is something to think about. You can select a different folder, basically just a different location on your computer in which to install Dropbox.
You can also do what’s called selective sync and honestly, I wouldn’t worry about this too much, but basically, what it does is. You can set certain folders to sync to this computer and to other computers and other folders won’t. Sync, like I say if I were you, I would not change this until I’m more experienced with Dropbox all right, I’m gon na click open my Dropbox welcome to Dropbox.
I can click get started and then there’s some slides that try to teach me how to use Dropbox I’ll just click through those and now I have to make a choice. Basically, this is another opportunity for Dropbox to get me to pay for their service. If I choose this free option here, then everything I put into my Dropbox is also on my computer. It’S on the hard drive of my computer, and so it does take up space on my computer and every other computer or device that I choose to sync with those files are also taking up space on those devices. If you don’t want that, if you want to free up space on all of your computers by having your files and folders in Dropbox, but they only exist online in the cloud they’re visible on your computer, but they actually live in the cloud. If that’s what you want, then click here, but as you can see, that eventually will cost.
So I’m gon na cancel that and I’ll just go back and use the personal account. So now that I’ve signed in to my Dropbox, you can see here at the top. It is not grayed out it’s in dark black, and that tells me that I’m signed in and I’m fully online, how I usually use Dropbox is, I click on it here and I click on this folder symbol and that opens up my Dropbox and shows me everything. That’S inside that Dropbox in this case, there’s just two documents now watch how easy it is to add more documents to that. I can just click and drag items that are on my desktop and drop them into that Dropbox folder. Now, what if the documents aren’t on the desktop? What, if there’s somewhere else on your computer? Well, that’s okay, just locate those items and click and drag and drop them into Dropbox. One trick I use with Dropbox when I’m on a Mac, and I have the Finder window open like this, is I hold the command key and tap T and what that does is it opens up a second tab in finder.
So now I can locate the item that I would like to put into Dropbox. Let’S say it’s this image here and then I can drag it and drop it right into Dropbox. Now, as soon as you do something like that notice, what happens the Dropbox symbol up at the top showed a sinking the symbol, a circle with an arrow, so that tells me that it’s sinking that file to the cloud? Okay, let’s see if it’s really working. If I go back to the Internet to my Dropbox account, I’m just gon na go to Dropbox comm. I should still be signed into my account and I can click on files and look there’s the file that I just barely uploaded into my account.
I’M gon na shrink this down a little bit, so you can see it a little bit better and see what’s going on so here in Dropbox, I can go down to files and it should list all three of these documents that are on my computer, but because They’Re in the Dropbox folder they’re being synced to my online cloud-based Dropbox storage space. If I delete a file or folder out of my Dropbox on my computer, you’ll notice, the first couple of times you do that it gives you the option of deleting it everywhere or not. I’M gon na say: don’t ask me this again. Whenever I delete something out of my Dropbox, I always want it to be deleted everywhere, so I’ll click delete everywhere and look how quickly that deleted the dr.
Apple Smith file. So that’s almost everything you need to know about using Dropbox now that I’ve got Dropbox set up. I can always click here on this folder to see what’s currently in my Dropbox and on my computer, and what, if I’m visiting a computer where I have not yet installed Dropbox, and I don’t want to maybe it’s a public computer or a friend’s computer. I probably wouldn’t want to install my Dropbox on a friend’s computer. Well, you don’t have to just go to Dropbox, calm, sign-in and you’ll see all of your files and folders. If you need to get those files and folders onto that public computer or onto a friend’s computer, that’s ok! You could just double click on the document that you need and then here in the upper right corner, there should be some dots or some other button there.
That you can click and download the document to the computer that you’re using, but in most cases, if you’re, not using a public computer or a friend’s computer. There should be no problem in you just installing Dropbox on every computer and every device that you own and when you do, that, whatever is in your Dropbox folder will be automatically synced to all of those devices and Dropbox works for Windows and Mac. It also works on Apple iPhones, on Android phones and pretty much just about any smart device. What about other computers if I want to set up Dropbox on yet another computer? All I would have to do is go to that other computer sign into Dropbox comm again and then go here to this symbol in the upper right. That’S my account symbol, but you’ll see, there’s the install button and I can just click to download another install file onto this.
Second computer. Go through those same steps I did before and sign in using my same email and password and then all of those same documents that are in the cloud and synced to this computer will be also synced to the new computer. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful if you did.
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