Dropbox is fantastic for collaborative editing and saving documents, but its internal mechanism—designed primarily to protect your information—can generate a series of unwanted duplicates that consume storage. Given that free Dropbox accounts have very limited capacity, the Conflicted Copy Resolver tool emerges as an interesting way to recover those lost bytes.
What are conflicted copies?
A common occurrence for users who frequently edit and save documents in Dropbox is the appearance of so-called “conflicted copies.” Dropbox explains it perfectly in its official documentation: If two people edit the same file at the same time, the system won’t try to merge the changes; instead, it saves two copies of the document, one of them labeled “conflicted copy” along with the date. These conflicted copies also appear when someone leaves a document open in applications with autosave support. At first they aren’t a big deal, but if you let them accumulate, your available space can quickly vanish.
How Conflicted Copy Resolver works
Add to that the fact that Dropbox only provides 2 GB for free accounts, and users will likely want to manage their conflicted copies more precisely. That’s exactly the role of Conflicted Copy Resolver. This website uses Dropbox’s authorization system—meaning it doesn’t store your credentials, and access can always be revoked from within Dropbox—to perform a scan and detect conflicts among your files. You have three options: keep the original copies, keep the most recent copies, or review case by case.
Is it safe to use?
Conflicted Copy Resolver is designed for those who rely heavily on Dropbox and store hundreds of files there. If the number of conflicted copies is low, I’m sure manual management is enough. At the same time, I understand that having an external service perform the scan might cause some discomfort, but its developers assure that it works locally only and doesn’t read the contents of your files.
