Big Floppy Donkey Disk

Friday, September 14, 2012

How to Max Out your Dropbox, Twice! for a Fiverr


I love Dropbox.

I think it's one of those neat, simple apps that works so well you barely even notice it.
It's great for sharing files between the office and home, sharing stuff with friends, synchronising between dual-booted operation systems and even as a totally painless backup for all your important documents.

I use it so much, in fact, that I completely maxed out my existing account last week. However, a friend of mine from work showed me a totally simple (and legal!) way to get a tonne of extra free space for dirt cheap using fiverr.com, a site where people will do a whole stack of things for you for the miserly sum of five bucks!

I've read a number of other guides on how to max out your Dropbox account but they all involve more time and effort than I care to invest. This one involves basically no effort on your behalf and you'll only need to wait a couple of hours before you get the extra space.

Read on to find out how...

What You'll Need

  • $5 (don't worry, this is a one-off fee)
  • A Paypal account or a credit card
  • One (or two) email account(s), depending on whether you want twice the space

Instructions

  1. Go to fiverr.com and search for "Dropbox". It should come up with a number of different dudes who will max out one or more accounts for you.
    Personally, I used fbmartking who gets you 2x21GB accounts.
  2. You'll be asked to pay up-front via Paypal or credit card but, rest assured, the guy doesn't get his money until the job is done. From the FAQ on the site:
    "As a buyer, you have the option to reject deliveries that did not meet the Gig’s description as advertised by the seller." - fiverr.com/feedback
  3. Next, you'll receive an email asking for confirmation. When you follow the link, it will take you to the seller's page, asking for confirmation:
    Just type "Okay." in the box below and hit enter. The seller just wants to confirm you understand the conditions.
  4. It says that it may take up to two days but I received an email roughly two hours later to say it was done, with a text file containing two usernames and passwords.
  5. I logged into Dropbox using the usernames and, sure enough, both accounts had 21GB of space (42GB in total!).
  6. Next, you'll probably want to change your email/username and password on these new accounts. Simply go to Settings --> Account Info --> Change Email:
    And Settings --> Security --> Change Password:
  7. I changed the email on my old Dropbox account over to some random address and changed the address on one of my new accounts to my proper email.
  8. Then on my desktop, I unlinked my computer to my old Dropbox account:
    And linked my new account (go back into Preferences and follow the prompts).
  9. That's it, you're done! Your files should start syncing to your new account.

How to Link Both Accounts on the Same Machine

Now that you have two Dropbox accounts, you might ask "Sure, but how do I use them both on the same machine??"

See my updated post on this.

Other Cool Stuff

  1. If you want even more space you can perform some of the bonus space tasks, e.g. link to Facebook/Twitter, etc. This should get you another ~1GB.
  2. It's nice to leave some positive feedback on your fiverr seller's wall, if you were happy with the service.
  3. You can also find a heap of other neat services on fiverr.com. This same guy also gets you 3x$100 AdWords coupons for $5. Pretty neat if you want to kick of some advertising for that new blog you're doing... you know... that food-lovers, DIY, music, fashion, tech-blog you're working on?

4 comments:

  1. That's awesome! Can you now write a guide on how to link both of the dropbox accounts to one computer? Thanks! You are the best!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Eddy, do you mean to have two separate Dropbox accounts on the same computer sync'd with one another? I'll see what I can do...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Eddy,

    For Mac:
    http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/run-multiple-dropbox-accounts-simultaneously-mac/

    I tried this and it definitely works. It is kind of ugly though (involves command line stuff). I might try and whip up something more elegant for a future post.


    For Windows:
    http://nionsoftware.com/dbpahk/overview

    Try this download. It is meant to be for keeping dropbox on a usb but you can actually just install it onto your hard drive and it creates a duplicate dropbox!

    Hope that helps!

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is great! I recently just got dropbox so this post will come in handy soon. Cheers!

    Shirley
    http://ohhiworld.wordpress.com

    ReplyDelete