There’s a better way
Until now, when I ran out of Dropbox space my strategy was just to create a new account with a different email address.
Needless to say, it’s not the best method.
Schedule Your Decluttering
Finesse is a new web app that may be a great solution to overstuffed Dropbox accounts by allowing you to schedule a date to automatically delete a file from your Dropbox account.
Whether you have a free account like me and just want to clear up some free space, or you use Dropbox for your business and store the majority of your assets and digital files there, it could be a great option to help automate the cleaning process.
The web app allows users to select single or multiple files in their Dropbox accounts and schedule an expiration date when they should be deleted.
There is a neat, clean user interface that looks similar to Dropbox’s, with several features like the ability to see a history of what you’ve deleted and a page to view all the files you have scheduled for deletion.
While you cannot recover files that have been deleted with Finesse, the ability to see a history of what you have deleted is a useful feature. This log can essentially serve as a trail to help you keep track of where things that are gone went. It’s almost like a digital breadcrumb trail that can help explain what dead Dropbox links used to lead to.
Planning Ahead
Of course, Finesse requires some foresight, such as knowing when you’d want you files to be deleted in the first place.
One application that seems especially useful for myself is with rough cuts of videos and audio that I’ve edited.
These files are big and take up a good chunk of Dropbox space, and after they’ve been sent to clients have little use. Scheduling them to only stay in my Dropbox for a few days until I know they’ve been reviewed can free up space for future work.
There are also cool applications that could be used for sharing advance copies of files, such as documents, music or videos for fans, subscribers or members of the press.
A musician might want a new song to be downloadable for a week as a giveaway for example, and could schedule an automatic expiration after a certain duration. A writer could share a version of a file and set it to delete at a certain date when a new version will be available to ensure that people aren’t accessing an outdated copy.
Can’t fix everything
Finesse is not the solution to all your cloud storage problems, but it does help automate a sometimes frustrating task.
If you have dozens of files in Dropbox and do not want to have to sort through them to delete, consider Finesse as a way to make that part of your life slightly easier.
