good stuff

Dropbox has become one of the favourite solutions to sync files between multiple devices due to its elegance and strong API. The free account offers 2GB of free space, but you can extend it up to 10.25GB. Basically you’re getting 8GB by creating referrals by yourself. I’ll explain an easy way to do this by yourself.

A word of warning: Using this method to enlarge your Dropbox might get you banned. In my opinion for a good reason. Dropbox needs to pay the bills for the S3-service they use too. I’m only posting this information because I think that the pro-accounts should become a lot cheaper. Don’t talk in the comments whether using this method is justified or not – it’s certainly NOT!

1. Login to your Dropbox-Account

2. Go to https://www.dropbox.com/referrals and write your Share Link or post it somewhere online where you can easily access it

3. Download VirtualBox and an Ubuntu Live-CD iso-image

4. Install VirtualBox and create an Virtual Machine for Ubuntu

5. Start the Virtual Machine and choose the Ubuntu.iso in the dialog-window

6. It will now boot the from the CD, once asked for it choose “Try Ubuntu….” as in the picture below

7. Once Ubuntu is up and running, start Firefox,go to the location where you stored the referral link or write it in the adress-bar

8. Create a new Dropbox-Account. The email-adress doesn’t have to exist

9. You get to a page where you’ll have to choose the Ubuntu-version of Dropbox you want to install, Click on ‘Ubuntu (x86 .deb)’

10. Open the file after the download and click on ‘Install Package’ in the new window

11. During the installation another window will open, click on ‘Start Dropbox’

12. Dropbox will finally open, check ‘I already have an account’ and insert the email-adress and password you registered with

13. If it was correct you just got another 250MB space on your Dropbox-account (I saw a notification on my host-pc which was also logged on in Dropbox)

14. Close the Virtual-Machine

15. Right-Click on the virtual-machine, click on change, go to the network, click on Advanced and click on the green button next to the Mac-adress field. This will generate a random mac-adress. Thats also the reason why using a virtual-machine is probably the fastest way to do this

16. To repeat the procedure go to Step 5

What about the last 250MB?

So, you really did this 32 times? You can get the last 250MB by going to https://www.dropbox.com/gs and completing 5 of the 6 six steps.

If you got an idea how to to make the procedure even easier, feel free to share it in the comments!