Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Beginner’s Guide to Dropbox for Windows – Cloud Storage”.
This is the beginner’s guide to Dropbox, for Windows, 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 will go ahead and click download Dropbox. Now, I’m using Google Chrome and it put Dropbox in my downloads folder if you’re using a different browser. It probably still put it in your downloads folder, but if not just locate it and click it to open it up, as you can see in Google Chrome, it kind of gives you a shortcut to it here. So I’ll click there to open up the Dropbox installer. Now, here Windows is trying to protect me. This installer was downloaded from the internet, and so Microsoft is just trying to keep me safe here and wants to know if I really do want to open it.
Yes, I do so. I click yes and it installs Dropbox. On this computer and when it finishes you’ll notice down here in the lower right corner of the screen that the Dropbox symbol will suddenly appear there, it is now you’ll notice that it’s greyed out a little bit and that’s because it’s trying to connect you can see It says connecting there, and so whenever you see that grayed out Dropbox symbol, it really does mean one of two things: either there is no internet connection or it’s struggling to connect to the internet, or the second possibility is that you have not yet signed in to Your Dropbox account, so let’s do that right now. Here we have a little pop-up that congratulates me on successfully installing Dropbox and there’s a button to open up my Dropbox.
But before I do that, I do want to give you a glimpse into the advanced settings. You can see by default, it’s chosen the main directory, the main folder on your computer, in which to install, draw and nine times out of ten. That’S what you want, and so you probably won’t change this. But let’s say you have two hard drives and maybe the secondary hard drive is extra big, and maybe you want to save space on the main drive.
You might want to switch this and choose your secondary drive as the place to install Dropbox. It’S really up to you, but, like I say nine times out of 10 you’re gon na leave this, as is the other thing you might want to look at. Is this selective sync? And if you change the settings there, basically, you can tell Dropbox to only sync certain folders on to this particular computer, maybe the other files sync on to other computers, but on this computer. Maybe I only want to sync two or three folders that would save space on this computer.
So it’s really up to you. If you want to look into those advanced settings, I’m just gon na click that open my Dropbox button and it does just that. It says: welcome to Dropbox and there’s a get started button. This is just gon na give me some tips, I’m just gon na click Next to flip through those quickly and I’ll click continue, and then, at this point, Dropbox is trying to get me to sign up for a paid account.
Once again, you can see here on the right they’re encouraging me to save some space by signing up for a professional account. If you do that, what it does is, it makes all of your Dropbox files online. Only they will only exist in the cloud on the internet.
They won’t really be on your computer at all. You’Ll see them. It says that they’ll be visible, but they’re stored actually in the cloud, but that does cost quite a bit. They have a temporary free trial that you can try, but for me I am just gon na stick with Dropbox basic all the files and folders in my Dropbox will actually exist on my computer and in the cloud. So I click continue with Dropbox basic and it’s now showing me my brand-new Dropbox folder.
This is a folder on my computer and it looks like it’s completely empty at this point, but I can drop things into this Dropbox folder and they will instantly be uploaded to the cloud and synced to my Dropbox account. So let’s look at that. I have just dragged my Dropbox folder to the left side of the screen, and I have my Dropbox com account webpage on the right and you can see what it says here: open your Dropbox folder. It’S open already drag and drop files or folders to sync them and to show this, I’m just gon na pull this aside a little bit.
You can see there’s a file on the desktop called Dropbox tips and I’ll just click and drag and drop it into this Dropbox and it’s trying to sync and notice here on the right. It says you just synced your first file, I can click continue and now I’m just going to go back to my Dropbox homepage and in fact, I’ll make that full screen. So you can see that a little better, here’s the file that I just now put into my Dropbox folder on my computer and it instantly synced it to my online cloud storage.
If I click here on files, you can see that there it is so I’m gon na go and close this browser window, and I just want to let you know that from now on, I can access this Dropbox folder simply by going down to the lower right Corner looking for the Dropbox icon and I can just click on it, this pop-up appears – and I can click here on this folder symbol – to open it up, and I can double click now to access this file. I can drag things into this folder or delete them out whatever I want to do, and it will instantly be synced on all of my devices and also in the cloud now back in my Dropbox comm account. I want to show you a hidden opportunity that you have if you wish, you had more storage space.
You can go here to your account symbol in the upper right corner; click on it and go to settings and you’ll notice that here on the plan tab. If you browse down it says, earn more space, you can earn more space by referring your friend to Dropbox. You’Ll, get a 500 megabyte bonus when they install Dropbox on their computer. So, to do that, all I have to do is click invite a friend and notice that not only do you get bonus storage, but they also get bonus storage for having used your recommendation. So here you can just put in email addresses of friends and family that you want to invite to Dropbox and send it to them. You can also invite them in these ways, through gmail contacts through Facebook and probably the best option, I would say, is this one? I can click copy link.
This link is generated, and then I can send this link to anybody and anyone that clicks this link and signs up for Dropbox will earn an extra five hundred megabytes of storage, and so will I to help you out with this. I’M going to put my referral link in the description below and if you click to sign up for Dropbox, using this link, you’ll get that extra storage. Okay. So that’s really what you need to know to use Dropbox. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did, please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media accounts like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, and definitely do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and when you do subscribe, consider clicking the Bell next to the subscribe button, if you do you’ll be notified whenever I post another video and watch for another video from me at least every Monday, if you’d like to support my youtube channel, consider becoming a supporter of mine through my patreon account and you’ll, see A link to that in the description below .