Is Dropbox just a total scam?

[Doom]

I keep getting message from Dropbox that I need to pay through the nose to get an ultramega account that gives me 586,383,293,292 exabytes of extra storage or whatever they want to charge me for, and I have to do this because I have only 2 GB of storage but I am trying to cram 4 GB of files into it, so I decided to login to it and see what I can delete to create more space, and I discovered that I had ONE file that is 355 bytes, which I deleted, making the account completely empty, which is what I thought it was in the first place.

So how is an empty account with 0 files taking up 4 GB of space?

I am left to conclude that the claim that I am out of storage is a lie and that Dropbox is not even a legitimate service, and yet it came with my computer, which made me think it must be legitimate otherwise why would HP install it by default on my laptop?

What is going on here?

[Kage_ar]

I used Dropbox for years, never had a problem. I've not used it for a very, very long time. I moved to a different cloud based storage solution.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

I use it all the time. I don't know what's triggering the problem in your case.

[Riverboat]

I bought an external drive. I don't trust others with my stuff.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

An external drive is less feasible when you work in multiple locations and have to share stuff with other people.

[Kage_ar]

I bought an external drive. I don't trust others with my stuff.

I remember the days of putting huge mag tapes in my trunk to take home from work every night as the "off site backup". We have an external drive, however, having learned that every drive can crash - cloud is far more reliable.