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Forum Discussion
Dropbox installation on new laptop is a complete disaster. All my files ended up taking up space.
I've installed Dropbox on my new laptop (Windows 10) with a 235GB hard drive and I've chosen online-only at the installation. Nonetheless, Dropbox has filled my hard drive and made my laptop complete...
Hi Megan,
I appreciate your taking the time to answer, and sorry for my late reply; I've been traveling.
I will follow your suggestions which make complete sense, but as I have mentioned I am paranoid about deleting the Dropbox folder (before reinstalling Dropbox), since nothing goes the way it is supposed to, so I have decided to order an external hard drive first and save all my files there prior to deleting the Dropbox folder, which scares me, even though I understand that it no longer communicates with my Dropbox folder online as I've unistalled the app.
So, I can only get back to you afterwards, and this will take a few days.
Thank you!
Megan
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi silvia24, don't worry and definitely take all the time you need!
I would also suggest an external hard drive if you're not feeling confident.
Test everything out, and let me know more, once you've gathered all the info.
Hi Megan,
I just wanted to let you know that I managed to resolve the problem, at last. I did get the external drive first and saved everything (which took several days), and then I double-checked that the Dropbox app was uninstalled and made sure that the laptop was disconnected from my Dropbox online. Then I deleted the Dropbox folder on the laptop, and afterwards I started the Dropbox app installation again.
In the meantime I'd found an old thread somewhere, where actually several people had similar issues to mine, not being able to stop Dropbox from filling up their hard drives, quite inexplicably. It's a very small minority of Dropbox users who are affected by this, and it was suggested there that this may happen when a third party overrides the default Dropbox installation, such as an antivirus program, firewall, or some organization. The latter applies to me, as I don't have full admin rights on my computer which is owned by my university. Of course my university claims that this has nothing to do with how Dropbox acted on my laptop, but I'm convinced that all my troubles are actually due to the fact they they've managed to create some settings on my laptop (unintentionally) which resulted in overriding the default settings and installation procedure for the Dropbox app.
So, the procedure that worked for me under these circumstances was the following: after installing the Dropbox app, I deselected all my folders on my laptop in selective sync first and let that sync (or, actually, not sync...) for about a day. Then I made sure that the "Save hard drive space automatically" was on in my Dropbox Preferences, and subsequently selected my folders to make them visible again in selective sync, ensuring that all of them were set to online only. This sequence did the trick. I believe that the key step that I was missing before was to immediately de-select all the Dropbox folders in selective sync after installing the app, which actually stopped Dropbox from syncing all the files to the hard drive, unlike simply selecting the online-only option from the beginnig which did not make any difference and never worked. Afterwards I was able to re-introduce these folders in the online-only mode, which was not possible before.
I hope that this solution will be useful for others who have similar troubles to mine , which makes computers with small hard drives unusable.
Also, thanks for your help! I appreciate it.
