My company's Dropbox account has one or more folders that are shared with several clients simultaneously. When we need to send a large file to one or more of them, we upload it to Dropbox, and contact the intended recipients to inform them of the file. What we want is a way to have an active record of when a given file in these folders is successfully downloaded, and who downloaded it. Is this information recorded somewhere by Dropbox, or is there some way we can create it? Ideally, the log would be in the format of some sort of text file which we could automatically download.
No, Dropbox itself doesn't provide this. There's no requirement for a user to log in to Dropbox in order to download a share link, so we don't even have a way to know which user downloaded the file. (The story may be slightly different with Dropbox for Business, where it's possible to get an audit log and perhaps require authentication before allowing a download.)
But you could build this yourself by giving each client a unique URL that records that the URL was hit and then redirects them to the real file.