Dropbox app fills up entirely the local iPhone storage

[Vincehood]

Hello,

I have a Dropbox Plus account which I share between my Mac, my Android Galaxy S21 and my wife iPhone SE. I am currently using only 22,1% of the 2 TB on my account.

On her iPhone, Dropbox is set-up to upload all her pictures to Dropbox but it keeps filling up the local storage. The iPhone runs IOS 16.2 with Dropbox 310.3. It has 64GB storage. 36 GB are used locally for pictures.  The goal is to sync all these pictures to Dropbox in order to reclaim the local space.

I tried several times and each time Dropbox ends-up filling up the iPhone local storage with 6.2 GB data! How is it possible?

I have read similar threads in this forum and applied the suggested corrective actions without success namely:

-clear Dropbox cache

-remove Dropbox app

-restart iPhone

-re-install Dropbox app

There is no backup, no offline files set-up on the iPhone.

Do you have any suggestion? Currently the presence of the Dropbox app on the iPhone makes the iPhone totally unusable since it runs out of space.

It is a quite serious issue!

Any suggestion?

Best Regards

/Vincent

[Hannah]

Hey @Vincehood, thanks for letting us know about this.

Can you send us a screenshot from your settings, showing this behavior?

Have you also tried clearing up the cache/offloading the app from the device's settings?

And if you completely remove the Dropbox app, does the issue go away?

Let me know what you find.

[Vincehood]

[Vincehood]

Hello @Hannah

>> Can you send us a screenshot from your settings, showing this behavior?

see attached pictures above showing the Dropbox app settings on the iPhone

Have you also tried clearing up the cache/offloading the app from the device's settings?

>> If you mean, click on the gear icon in the Dropbox IOS app + Clear cache -> Yes, I have done it

And if you completely remove the Dropbox app, does the issue go away?

>> Yes, I came to the conclusion that the Dropbox is the one filling the phone local storage. So when I remove it + restart the phone, the problem is gone  (I get back the storage earlier used by the Dropbox app) but I have no Dropbox solution then...

By the way I noticed the same problem on another iPhone we have (iPhone 8+ with IOS 16.0.2 + latest Dropbox client)

Thanks

[Hannah]

Thanks for the screenshots, Vince!

Can you also please go to the phone's Settings > General > iPhone storage > Dropbox and send us a screenshot of what you see there?

[Vincehood]

Hello @Hannah 

This picture shows the status before I install or configure the Dropbox client on the Iphone (6.7G of free space):

These 2 pictures show where I end up after running Dropbox sync for a few minutes:

Dropbox takes more or less all the space left and stops its sync complaining about lack of space...

[Jay]

Hi @Vincehood, in general, if you have camera uploads enabled, the Dropbox mobile app would need extra space on your device to assist with caching and uploading those images to Dropbox itself. 

Are any of the images on the phone being uploaded automatically via the app?

[Vincehood]

Hello @Jay 

I understand the cache need for extra space but it seems that the cache keeps growing as sync executes.

It looks like a few pictures are getting through as sync executes until the phone storage is completely filled

[Jay]

Do you have the Dropbox desktop application installed? If you connect the phone manually, you can enable the desktop version of the camera uploads, which uses a different process.

It'll re-upload the previous images that have already been uploaded (since the desktop and mobile app use different methods), and once the images are all in the Dropbox folder and synced to the site, you could (if you wish) delete the images from the phone to free up space.

[Vincehood]

Hi @Jay 

thanks for the suggestion.

Yes I also use the Dropbox app on my MacBook.

I agree I could do that as a work around but I would really like to have a convenient "wireless" solution not implying that I need to become some kind of storage admin for my wife mobile phone 😉

Then this could imply the creation of a lot of duplicates since I don't know how many/which pictures have already been uploaded (I have to admit I miss a solution for sorting out / organising my pictures in a semi automated fashion...)

/Vincent