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Overview

Registration is accomplished with dropbox.mit.edu.
Files are accessed with dropbox.com or the Dropbox app.

Dropbox is a cloud-storage company founded by two MIT students. IS&T has licensed the Dropbox Enterprise service for the entire MIT community. Dropbox Enterprise provides the MIT community with large storage capacity and convenient access to data via Windows, MacOS, Linux and mobile native clients as well as via any web browser. With the Dropbox client, you can access your cloud data as though it was a folder on your local disk. Dropbox also lets you share portions of your cloud storage, with a number of different protection/authentication schemes. You can also provide both read and write access to other Dropbox users.

Dropbox is primarily intended to be a mechanism for sharing data rather than storing or archiving large data sets. Graduate students that may have large amounts of data related to their academic or research pursuits can work with their advisor and/or department graduate administrator to review options for obtaining additional storage. Undergraduate students should contact their undergraduate administrator to review options, only if the high level of use is directly related to classwork.

For general Dropbox support, please contact helpdesk@mit.edu or your local IT support provider.

For an overview of Dropbox and other data storage options, see: Data Storage and Collaboration Options.

How to Obtain

MIT faculty, staff and students can create MIT Dropbox accounts following the steps outlined below:

  1. Go to https://dropbox.mit.edu.
  2. Review the Usage Guidelines on the enrollment page (also available here).
  3. Acknowledge you've reviewed the guidelines by clicking the checkbox and click the Next button.
  4. Congratulations! Your account has been created! You should receive an invite to join MIT's Dropbox delivered to your MIT email address.
  5. Open your MIT email inbox and open your invitation. Click the Join the MIT Team button to start the setup process.

Useful notes:

  • If you already have a Dropbox account associated with your MIT email address, the setup process will ask to link your existing personal account with another email address. No need to worry, your personal account will continue to use the same quota. Dropbox provides useful instructions on their website.
  • If you're new to Dropbox, you can find setup instructions here on their website.

MIT Affiliates can be provided temporary access if they are employed by MIT, reporting to a full-time staff member, and performing work for the institute. To request access for an affiliate, a full-time staff member should email the request to servicedesk@mit.edu and be sure to include the affiliates MIT email address.

If an affiliate only requires access to see shared files or obtain free cloud storage, they will not be approved for an account. Staff and students may not request access for their partner or spouse unless they are actively employed by the institute. Students may not sponsor affiliates for Dropbox access under any circumstances. 

Desktop and Mobile Apps

With Dropbox desktop apps you can access your dropbox files from your workstation as easily as you can your local files. Be sure to set up Smart Sync to save local disk space. The mobile app turns any smartphone into a document scanner and lets you stitch pages together into a single file for submission.

Common Questions

Getting Started

Collaboration

When you share a folder with another MIT user, it is automatically added to their shared folder list. Dropbox no longer requires the user to accept an invitation join the folder unless EITHER the folder has 10k+ files and subfolders OR 100+ recipients and over 100 MB of files.

Troubleshooting

Documentation for Developers

See Also

Have Questions or Still Need Help?

Additional escalation information for Help Staff can be found here: [hd:Dropbox Recon].

IS&T Contributions

Documentation and information provided by IS&T staff members →

Last Modified:

June 04, 2024

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