Dropbox for business, without the "business" package

1,044 Views | 4 Replies | Last: 9 yr ago by Agmechanic
Scooley01
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AG
I've been a regular user of Dropbox for years now, and I have come to rely on it quite heavily. I've actually managed to rack up 89.1GB of space from various events (although some of that is promotional space that expires after X years).

The company I work for currently has a file server upstairs, that we use to maintain files across the office. There's about ~100GB of files currently on that server, and everything gets accessed fairly regularly.

A bit after I was hired, I helped a few of the upper management folks in the office get set up with Dropbox accounts for ease of collaborating on files and sharing them with existing and prospective clients. Since then, we've actually been utilizing both the physical on-site server and Dropbox separately, which doesn't really make sense.

Dropbox for Business is the recommended choice for our situation...but it costs $15 per month, per user, which gets expensive quickly. It also includes 1TB of space per user, which is massive overkill for our needs.

As a less expensive alternative, I was thinking we could potentially just set up a single "Master" Dropbox account with a Pro subscription ($10/mo, flat rate), and then have our employees set up with free Dropbox accounts that the Master account shares files/folders with. That also enables some finesse/control over which files different tiers of employees have access to.

Does anyone see any issues with that option? Do Dropbox free accounts prohibit use for businesses? I didn't see any mention of it in their Acceptable Use policy, but it feels like a "loophole" to use one paid account and several free accounts, so I wanted to be sure that I wasn't breaking any rules or likely to run into any issues.
gnowak12
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AG
Sounds fine. I would suggest making it a company policy to add two-factor authentication to all of the accounts as a security measure. You might also consider doing local backups of your important stuff.

We do Dropbox business at our company and we love it. I have a personal Dropbox that runs alongside the company Dropbox and aside from the storage size, it's practically the same.
TracerX
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Seems like it would work as long as everyone only needed a small subset of those files. Just remember that shared folders count toward each user on the share's quota so you wouldn't be able to share more than 2GB from the master account with each user.
AGSPORTSFAN07
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AG
Aside from the obvious security risks involved, the standard Dropbox user will have their inbox fill up super quick depending on what you're sharing with them. And if they're "editors", you could start seeing some unwanted file/folder deletions.

And for the record, I am a Dropbox, Dropbox for Business, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Box, Box Enterprise and Google Drive user.
reb,
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AG
+1 on two-step authentication

i'd definitely leverage the work email addresses involved to increase space via the referral system.
Agmechanic
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AG
We use spider oak at our engineering firm and like it a lot.
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