We're making changes to the Community, so you may have received some notifications - thanks for your patience and welcome back. Learn more here.
Forum Discussion
Dropbox files now take up double space on my Mac
Hi there!
So today, just out of nowhere, I noticed all my Dropbox files have gone online-only. So I click on the clouds with the arrow down to download them to my MacBook. However, I noticed that a...
It seems odd that this support question is taking so long. To answer the question you asked the OP, yes, I have that checked in DB.
Should I open a new question to get any kind of information/answers on what I'm supposed to do with the seemingly 100+ gigs of files that suddenly showed a cloud icon next to them even though I know I had them on my computer and were offline (not online only)? That's a lot of bandwidth to redownload them all and I need to know that it's not going to take up double the space suddenly...because I never deleted those files to begin with. Why won't you answer any of the other questions being asked about the green checkmarks, establishing which files are actually on the hard drive, etc?
Have you watched the videos posted earlier in the thread?
Hi azodl and rumbers and anyone else who has the same issue.
I think I finally found a solution! I was this close to cancelling my Dropbox subscription.
So with the latest update, it seems Dropbox keeps the old files in some location and then moves everything to a new location and runs the app from the new location and forgets that you already have some of the files on your Hardrive in the old location.
Please read the following until the end and then begin the process if you like (I can't guarantee it works and just letting you know that I can't take any responsibility if something goes wrong).
To address this issue:
- Uninstall Dropbox (drag and drop from Applications to user trash)
- Empty trash.
- Find your Dropbox files. For me, I had to use Command + shift + . (that's a dot at the end, so you should push 3 buttons) to show hidden files on Mac. Go to users, your username, library (which is hidden), Cloudstorate, and then remove your Dropbox. Your files must be online and given Dropbox is uninstalled, your files will stay in place online.
- Empty your trash.
- Restart.
- At this point, I noticed that my hard drive still takes the same amount of space, meaning Dropbox files were still in my computer somewhere. After 30 minutes of messing around and not doing anything specific, suddenly, I got my 50GB back!
- Install Dropbox again.
- Once you install, you might get an error that it can't run the Dropbox, in that case, go to this link and follow advanced reinstall (https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstall). When I was doing that some of the commands that it asks came back with errors or didn't do anything. But it worked anyway!
- When re-installing, select online-only when it asks where you wanna keep the files.
- Once you install and the files are synced, you get a notification that there's a newer version of Dropbox that keeps your files in a new place (i.e. Cloud storage). I'm doing that right now and it says it takes 45 minutes. I'm assuming once you do that, given none of the Dropbox files were on my Hardrive, Dropbox won't take double space.
I really hope it helps!
