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lmalma's avatar
lmalma
Helpful | Level 6
2 years ago

Confused about what's taking up space in my 2 GB account

My Dropbox folder on my hard drive contains 1948 items totalling 266.9 MB. Why does Dropbox say I have 98.4% of 2.0 GB used? On the Dropbox website I can see a (Symlink Backup Copy) for eack of the...
Quota
Storage space
  • lmalma's avatar
    lmalma
    2 years ago

    Thanks again for your additional advice. That pointed me in the right direction.

     

    I didn't have any selective un/sync files, but I decided to look inside the folders on the Dropbox website that were marked (Symlink Backup Copy). I don't have these on disk here. To my surprise, these were not just straight copies of my usual regular in-use folders/files, but had additional files and folders inside that I must have symlinked before that support ended in 2019. One of those (Symlink Backup Copy) folders was 1 GB itself. So I deleted, then permanently deleted, those (Symlink Backup Copy) folders after downloading them as ZIPs to be safe. So, thanks to your suggestion, my account now shows as 241.77 MB (or 11.8%) of 2 Gb used.

     

    One final point, though, the pop-up confirm window that shows with the Permanently Delete button says something to the effect that permanently deleting files does not free up space. But it actually did in my case. (?)

     

    So, if anyone else has diminishing space issues that they don't understand and if they were using Dropbox prior to 2019, check on the website for dormant (Symlink Backup Copy) folders that might be filled with some old unneeded content.

    And with this I'll consider my issue resolved. Thanks again Rich and Walter!

magnator's avatar
magnator
New member | Level 2

I'll add that I also deleted all linked apps

Hannah's avatar
Hannah
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
10 months ago

Hey magnator, thanks for reaching out to us.

 

If you plan page reports that your space is being taken up by backup files, you should be able to find them in your backups page here.

 

If all your computers are already disconnected from your account, you can just delete the backups, to free up your space from that page.

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