Access Keys:
Skip to content (Access Key - 0)

Dropbox Landing Page

MIT has increased Dropbox default storage quotas to 10 TB for MIT faculty, lecturers, and Fall 2020 teaching assistants and to 500 GB for all others at no charge. In response to requests by community members, these quota increases were made to better facilitate remote learning, working, and collaboration.

On this page:

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 for Business service for the entire MIT community. Dropbox for Business 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

The process for MIT faculty, staff and students differs from the process for affiliates. Affiliates can be given access if a faculty or staff member requests it on their behalf. To create an affiliate account, send an email including the request and the affiliate's Kerberos username to accounts@mit.edu.

MIT requires ALL Affiliates requesting access have their sponsor confirm that Dropbox is needed for them to complete their normal responsibilities. If the affiliate only needs access to see shared files, they will not be approved for an account.

MIT faculty, staff and students can create MIT Dropbox accounts for themselves. To make your account:

  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 for Business 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.
  • Dropbox no longer supports Windows XP desktop synching. You will still be able to access your files through the Dropbox website. If you would like to sync your files to the desktop, please upgrade to Windows 7 or higher.

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

For more information, see Dropbox's What are the Minimum Bandwidth Requirements for Sending and Receiving Video in Cisco Webex Meetings?

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:

March 08, 2023

Get Help

Request help
from the Help Desk
Report a security incident
to the Security Team
Labels:
dropbox dropbox Delete
faq faq Delete
document document Delete
sharing sharing Delete
business business Delete
account account Delete
api api Delete
c-dropbox c-dropbox Delete
Enter labels to add to this page:
Please wait 
Looking for a label? Just start typing.
Feedback
This product/service is:
Easy to use
Average
Difficult to use
This article is:
Helpful
Inaccurate
Obsolete
Adaptavist Theme Builder (4.2.3) Powered by Atlassian Confluence 3.5.13, the Enterprise Wiki