How to Increase Your DropBox Space for Free

As a followup to my recent posts about protecting your passwords and securing your financial documents, I just wanted to share some tips for increasing your DropBox storage space without spending a dime…

As a reminder, DropBox is an online file storage and synchronization service. Whatever you put in your DropBox (basically just a folder on your hard drive) gets mirrored to their servers, and then propagates back down to whatever other computers or devices (like an iPhone) that you have hooked to your account.

There is also a web interface so you can access your files from anywhere, whether or not that particular computer is connected to your account. You can also share certain folders within your DropBox with other users, so it’s very handy for file sharing and collaborative work. Oh, and your data is encrypted while on their servers.

Free DropBox accounts come with 2GB of storage, though you can pay to upgrade to as much as 100GB. Once you sign up, you can look in your account for a referral link that you can share with friends to get an extra 256MB for yourself (plus 256MB for them). You can refer a maximum of 32 friends for a total of 8GB of bonus space, bringing your potential total up to 10GB of free space.

If you have access to a “dot edu” (.edu) e-mail account, the referral deal is even better… You can still refer a maximum of 32 friends, but your bonus doubles to 512MB per user, for a total of 16GB of bonus space. That brings your potential total up to 18GB of free space.

Of course, the referral program is limited by your ability to get people to sign up, and it’s not particularly easy to get 32 friends or family members to sign up, but every little bit helps. The good news it that, even if you don’t refer anyone, you can get 128MB of free bonus space for completing each of the following tasks:

• Connect your Twitter account with DropBox
• Connect your FaceBook account with DropBox
• Send a Tweet about DropBox
• Follow @Dropbox on Twitter
• Tell DropBox why you love their service

These things only take a few minutes to do and, if you’re not comfortable with the Twitter or Facebook integration, rumor has it that you can simply revoke the privileges (and/or delete your Tweet) after receiving your bonus.

So… To sum up, you start out with 2GB of space, and can get bring that up close to 3GB by completing a few social networking tasks. On top of that you can get up to 8GB or 16GB through the referral program.

To validate your .edu for better referral bonuses, click here, and to complete the social networking tasks for free space click here.

That’s it. Have fun!