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grtwd's avatar
grtwd
Helpful | Level 6
6 months ago

macOS Sonoma has Dropbox Wrongly Reporting Not Enough Disk Space

macOS 14.5 (23F79) on 2024 MacBook Air; Dropbox v200.4.7134   Dropbox has paused syncing, with the little "x" on the menubar icon. On clicking the icon, it says "not enough disk space".   However...
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  • grtwd's avatar
    grtwd
    6 months ago

    I was thinking further on your "evictable items" suggestions, and perhaps I have found the issue, or a big part of it anyway - Apple's Time Machine.

    Last night I attached my laptop to my external Time Machine disk for the first time for about a week. This should have allowed TM to offload its local snapshots to the external disk. Just now, I also did (at the terminal):

    sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

    sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots /

    which deleted 15 local snapshots.

     

    Now, macOS Settings -> General -> Storage says "1TB of 2TB used".
    And statvfs says 990GB free. So they agree again!

     

    It seems that TimeMachine local  (i.e. on-disk) snapshots were taking 800-900GB of space on the disk away from statvfs. Over the last week, there have been some large files copied to, and removed from the laptop disk, namely some KVM snapshots (40GB - 150GB). I can imagine that that caused these Time Machine local snapshots to become unusually large.

     

    I have also adjusted macOS Settings -> General -> Time Machine -> Options -> Backup Frequency from "Automatically Every Hour" to "Automatically Every Day".

     

    DropBox feature suggestion: In the event that DropBox thinks it does not have enough space to complete a sync based on statvfs - Figure out how much space is occupied by "evictable items" - Time Machine Snapshots, iCloud mirrors, the Trash folder - and let the user know if those elements are making the difference, and what to do about it - perhaps even offer to carry out the necessary actions for the user, if that's possible.

     

    Thanks once more!

Walter's avatar
Walter
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

Hey grtwd - sorry to hear you'e having issues with this and thanks for all the details you shared with us.

 

If this persists after rebooting your computer, could you please send us a screenshot of the app's exact status as shown in your menu bar?

 

Also, where is your Dropbox folder located as per the Sync tab in the app's preferences?

 

Any additional information or screenshots are more than welcome!

 

PS: Your post was auto-spammed by the system due to its length - apologies for the late response. 

grtwd's avatar
grtwd
Helpful | Level 6
6 months ago

Hi Walter -

Thanks for responding. My Dropbox folder location, as per Dropbox Preferences, is /Users/<username>/Dropbox, i.e. the default.

 

I have cleared the condition for now by reducing disk usage below 1TB (on the 2TB disk), but may be able to recreate it in future. The "not enough space" message was revealed when single-clicking on the menu-bar icon, where it would normally say "Your files are up to date".

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