Mo Dropbox

[Touchagrey]

For those of you who have a bit of technical skills, here's an easy way to expand your initial 2 gb Dropbox allocation.

 

Dropbox offers extra space, either 250mb or 500mb for referring a new user. While you could harass all your friends, there's a simple way to do it yourself. What's required is a referral to someone with a unique email address AND a unique MAC address. A MAC address is a unique code that's burned into your computer's hardware network adaptor. This is dropbox's imperfect way of ensuring you're not self referring just to gain space.

 

The solution is to use Oracle's free Virtualbox program, an app that let's you load up a whole operating system within the one you're already running. So... Your main computer could be Windows, Apple, or Linux, but with Virtualbox installed, a Windows machine can run another Windows OS as just another app, or could run a Linux machine within a window on your main Win 7 computer. These are called Virtual Machines and emulate all of the attributes of a real computer, including the network adaptor and the adaptor's MAC address. Even better, you can set the Virtual Machine's MAC address to any code you want.

 

So the steps to get more Dropbox space are:

 

1. Create a Virtual Machine in Virtualbox. I use Ubuntu because its free and installs quickly, but you could also use any version of Windows as well.

2. Create a dummy email address at gmail, yahoo, hotmail, or wherever. Use an email service with a web mail interface.

3. From your normal computer and your normal Dropbox login, send a referral invite to the dummy email address you just created.

4. Using your Virtual Machine and its web browser, retrieve the referral email and sign up for Dropbox under the dummy email name. You've just added extra space to your original Dropbox account through completing the referral process. This worked because the referral was to a unique email address AND the unique MAC address of the Virtual Machine.

5. Shutdown your Virtual Machine, I.e. click the shutdown button on the Virtual Machine (not your main computer!!)

6. In the Virtualbox app on your main computer, assign your powered down Virtual Machine a new MAC address (in the networking tab) and power the virtual machine back up. There's a button to create a random MAC address.

7. Starting by creating yet another new dummy email address, go back to step 2, repeat and rinse until you've got the maximum Dropbox size: 32 gb.

 

Should take you an hour to max out Dropbox.

[Woofiee]

Clever! I like it!