DropBox limitations - don't overindulge

[Gibsonm]

So as some of you may know I've been encountering issues with DropBox links being blocked recently.

Below is the scripted DropBox response.

We automatically ban public links when they are responsible for an uncommonly large amount of traffic. These include all of the sharing links, not just the Public folder links.

The limit is 20GB/day for Basic accounts. Both Pro and Dropbox for Business accounts have a much higher limit of 200GB/day. While we want you to be able to share your files with your friends, we have to keep a limit to prevent abuse.

Even with a traffic limit of 20 GB or 200 GB per day, it's entirely possible for links to go over the limit. Let's say you've sent a link to a file to a small number of people. One of the recipients could have sent the link to others, leading to more people viewing the file and using bandwidth. Or, one of the recipients could have downloaded the file multiple times; each download is counted separately for bandwidth tracking purposes.

Links are banned temporarily (1 day for the first time) and your account will eventually restore its public links.

I have a "free" (perhaps crippled would be a better descriptor) account so I'm allowed 20GB of downloads per day.

I usually post a AAR per BG ANZAC or similar session. These are say 40Mb is size (+/-).

Using the wrong marketing equivalent that 1000MB = 1GB, 20GB should allow for something like 500 downloads in a 24 hour period.

I somehow don't think that so many people visit here each day that the subset of those interested in one of my AARs is 500 people (I suspect Ssnake would love it if that many people visited per day).

So the alternatives as per the above is:

a. People are downloading the file over and over and over again or

b. People are forwarding the link or putting it on their own sites and telling others.

Either way my current system is not sustainable if this rate of downloading continues.

If for some reason you find the files that I post so interesting that you want to share them with your mates, PLEASE download them once, put them on you own DropBox account and send your link to your friends.

Alternatively please observe a "one download per day per person" limit.

Otherwise the current process will stop and the links currently posted will become unreliable.

Thanks for reading.

Edited June 6, 2014 by Gibsonm

[Captain_Thunder]

Try other free cloud services like mega.co.nz, pcloud.com, or tusfile.net which gives you 600MB of free space to name a few. Mega gives you a 50GB of free space. Pcloud gives you 10GB of free space and will let you stream or download a video from it's site, example http://pc.cd/fnY . I have accounts on both. MSEI 10 and 11 aren't fully compatible with MEGA, but it seems to be working better now that six months ago. Mega recommends the usual array of alternate browsers out there.

I read in the recent issue of Consumer Reports magazine that Dropbox has some privacy issue that they have been slow to address.

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2160163/cloud-computing/12-free-cloud-storage-options.html

[Lt DeFault]

Could it be web crawlers?