A shared drive shows full or nearly full, and the first instinct on a social team is to blame the clutter: too many old briefs, too many copy doc rounds, too many screenshots nobody deleted. That instinct is almost always wrong. A team can generate thousands of small text and image files without denting a storage tier, then watch a handful of raw video exports from one shoot consume the same tier in an afternoon. This is a size problem, not a count problem.
The shared drive that filled up overnight
Storage sits comfortably under the cap for weeks, then a warning appears after one shoot day. The reflexive response is to go looking for what to delete: old versions of a brief, a folder of calendar exports, a stack of PNGs from a design review. Clearing all of that barely moves the needle, because none of it was ever large enough to matter. The files that actually filled the drive are usually still sitting there, untouched, because nobody thought to look at a handful of video files first.
File count and file size are not the same variable, and a shared drive’s capacity is governed by the second one. A social team’s routine output, briefs, calendars, copy docs, static image exports, can run into the thousands of files over a year and still occupy a small fraction of an entry-level tier. A single afternoon of raw video can occupy far more.
Why documents and briefs almost never move the needle
The non-video contents of a social team’s shared drive are dominated by a small set of file types: campaign briefs, content calendars, copy documents, and static image exports for posts and stories. A brief or a calendar is text and light formatting. A copy doc is text. A batch of static image exports for a week of posts, JPEGs and PNGs sized for social platforms, is modest next to a video file, since a still image is one frame and a video is thousands of them.
Apple’s engineering documentation on its ProRes video codec family puts this in vendor terms: target data rates run roughly 45 to 500 megabits per second for a single 1080p stream, depending on the ProRes variant (Apple, “Apple ProRes: Family Overview” white paper, fetched 2026-09-09). A megabit-per-second rate sustained for one minute of footage already outweighs a folder of text documents, which carry no data rate at all.
What a raw export actually weighs, and why
The gap that matters is not raw video versus documents in the abstract. It is raw camera footage sitting untouched in a shared folder versus the final, compressed clip that eventually gets posted. A shoot produces footage in a format chosen for editing flexibility, not file size: high bitrate, often with more color information than a delivery format keeps, so an editor has room to grade, crop, and adjust before the file is finished. The posted clip is compressed hard on top of that, because platforms compress further on upload and a small file plays back faster. The raw original is, by design, much larger, and it tends to sit in a shared drive long after the finished clip has shipped.
The exact megabytes consumed per minute depends on the camera, resolution, frame rate, and codec, so there is no single figure. Apple’s published rates illustrate the range: ProRes 422 Proxy targets approximately 45 megabits per second at 1080p, while ProRes 422 HQ targets approximately 220 megabits per second at the same resolution (Apple, “Apple ProRes: Family Overview” white paper, fetched 2026-09-09).
Running the numbers against a published storage tier
Dropbox’s plans page, fetched 2026-09-09, lists 2 GB on its free Basic plan and 2 TB as the starting allowance on its entry-level paid individual plan, with team plans starting at 3 TB and 15 TB (Dropbox, “Plans,” fetched 2026-09-09). Take the 2 TB individual tier, the size a small social team or a freelance editor realistically works inside.
At the ProRes 422 HQ rate of approximately 220 megabits per second, one minute of footage works out to roughly 1,650 megabytes, about 1.6 GB (220 megabits per second, divided by 8 to convert to megabytes, multiplied by 60 seconds). A 2 TB tier holds roughly 2,048 GB, which by that math caps out around 1,200 to 1,300 minutes, call it twenty hours, before the tier holds nothing but that footage. That sounds like headroom until it meets a single shoot day: two hours of raw B-roll at that rate is already around 200 GB, close to ten percent of the entire tier, from one afternoon.
A month of briefs, calendars, and copy docs does not come close. Those files carry no data rate at all, and a month of a team’s document output would need to be an implausibly large batch to approach even a single gigabyte [EVIDENCE NEEDED: a vendor-published typical file size for a business document, to state the document side as a number rather than a directional claim]. Dropbox’s tier size and Apple’s data rate together establish the shape of the problem: a handful of unedited exports from one shoot can occupy a meaningful share of an entry-level tier, while routine document output typically does not.
The three points in the workflow where footage gets forgotten in a shared folder
- Immediately after the shoot, before an editor pulls the file in. Footage lands in a shared folder as a staging step. If there is a gap before the edit starts, the raw file sits in shared storage doing nothing but occupying space. This is also the point where the same raw export gets reformatted for five feeds before anyone circles back to the original.
- After editing, when the raw original is not deleted because nobody owns that step. Once a finished clip exists, the raw file has usually served its purpose but stays anyway, because deleting source footage is not anyone’s assigned responsibility. If the footage came from a stock library, it is worth checking how a licence can limit what happens to that footage later before it is archived or reused.
- After a campaign wraps, kept “just in case” with no review date attached. Footage from a finished campaign frequently gets left in place indefinitely, because there is no scheduled point at which anyone revisits whether it is still needed.
What actually clears space, and what does not
Deleting a hundred small documents, old calendar exports, or duplicate copy drafts has a negligible effect, because those files were never large enough to matter. Clearing or archiving a handful of raw video exports has an outsized effect, for the same reason the math above shows: the video files are where the space actually went.
Compressing or transcoding a raw file before archiving reduces its footprint, since a lower data rate takes up less space per minute. The exact ratio depends on the source and target codecs, and no single ratio applies universally, so this piece does not state one. A raw file is not obligated to stay raw once editing is finished.
Get the file size math right before the next shoot
followedapp tracks the tooling layer around social media work, including storage and workflow tools that sit next to a content calendar rather than inside it. If a shared drive keeps filling up between shoots, the fix usually starts with knowing where the space actually goes, not with buying a bigger tier and running the same workflow again.
FAQ
What actually fills up a team’s shared drive first?
Raw or lightly compressed video exports, not documents, briefs, or calendar files. A single shoot’s worth of unedited footage carries a continuous data rate, in megabits per second, that a static document or image does not have, which is why a handful of video files can outweigh thousands of smaller files combined.
How much bigger is a raw video file than a document?
There is no single universal number, because file size varies by resolution, frame rate, and codec. Apple’s own documentation puts a single minute of 1080p ProRes footage at somewhere between roughly 340 megabytes and 1.6 gigabytes depending on the codec variant, while a text document carries no comparable continuous data rate at all. The gap is orders of magnitude, not a fixed multiple.
Should raw footage be deleted after a video is edited and published?
This is a workflow tradeoff, not a single correct answer. Deleting the raw file frees the space, but the footage can no longer be re-edited or re-cut if the finished clip needs a change later. Keeping it indefinitely avoids that risk but is exactly what fills a shared drive over time. Teams that handle this well assign an explicit owner and a review point, rather than defaulting silently to either extreme.
Is more cloud storage the actual fix, or is it a workflow problem?
Buying a larger tier delays the problem without changing what caused it. The same unreviewed raw footage keeps accumulating, so a bigger tier just moves the date on which the drive fills up again. An ownership step, someone responsible for archiving or deleting raw exports on a schedule, addresses the cause, which a larger tier by itself does not.
Sources
- Dropbox, “Plans”, fetched 2026-09-09, HTTP 200. Cited for published storage tier sizes (2 GB Basic, 2 TB entry individual paid tier, 3 TB and 15 TB team tiers).
- Apple, “Apple ProRes: Family Overview” white paper, fetched 2026-09-09, HTTP 200. Cited for published target data rates of ProRes codec variants at 1080p (approximately 45 to 500 megabits per second depending on variant).