You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Serious problem with Hard Drive space
Hi
I have a major problem with disk space, and I just can't seem to find an answer to the problem.
I have a little macbook with minimal HD space, hence why dropbox is very handy for me.
I am using shared dropbox within a company. That is, we are all connected to the same account but only sync our one personal folder.
With 16GB of space available, I download and install dropbox, then proceed to sync the one and only folder I wish to sync, which is 2.5GB large.
Having done this, I now have 13.5GB available. Which is spot on.
However, over the course of a few days I suddenly begin to get messages warning me that my HD space is running low, until eventually the messages turn to "your hard drive is full".
If I uninstall dropbox, I get my 16GB back. I start again, and it just keeps happening.
If I leave it and get on with something else, I find that my HD space begins to gradually and erratically creep back up again.
I have tried and checked and tried and checked, and I am only syncing the folder I require. So why does dropbox keep stealing my available space? Note: this situation doesn't happen if dropbox is not installed.
This is incredibly unproductive as I seem to be spending most of my time at work configuring dropbox. Not only that, but when my computer HD goes down to 0bytes of space, I can't get anything done at all.
- Rich
Super User II
Is there a lot of activity in the shared folder? If so, as files are deleted, Dropbox doesn't actually delete them right away. It stores deletions in the hidden .dropbox.cache folder in the root of your Dropbox folder. Deleted files are typically kept for 3 days before being purged. This is done to aide in recovery in case something was deleted by mistake.
You can delete the content of the folder, but don't delete the folder itself. Also, if you're in the process of syncing and you delete the content, you'll likely have to start that sync process over again as the cache is also used during the sync process.Hi Rich
Thanks for your reply.
There is a fair amount of activity on the overall dropbox account. But not in my single chosen selectively synced folder. I estimate that I am running at about a 20% ratio of dropbox activity to hard drive space. I certainly am not deleting files that would quickly fill up 13GB+ of space.
Is it possible that there's some ropey programming that is causing dropbox to allow other people's files to be downloaded to my machine in the background?
- RichHighly unlikely. Have you looked to see where the 13GB of data is actually located? If it's taking up that space on your drive, it has to be somewhere.
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
