Local storage decreasing when I set folders to online-only

[oduibhir]

I need to free up space on my iMac's local drive. I set one folder on my Dropbox drive to online-only and instead of freeing up space, I'm watching it slowly eat up the local drive. The folder I set to online-only had just 42mb worth of files on it but my local drive space has now decreased by almost 1gb and continues to decrease even though all the sub-folders and files of the online-only folder have the cloud icon next to them now.

I am on a Mac running MacOS 13.5.2 and Dropbox version 186.4.6207. 

[Jay]

Hi @oduibhir, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you try clearing the cache folder to see if this helps?

Keep me updated with any progress!

[oduibhir]

Thank you for responding Jay. I dragged the sub-folders in the cache folder to the trash (but did not empty the trash). The available space on my local drive continues to go down at a pretty rapid pace. I'm down about 2.5 gb now.

John

[Jay]

Are you certain that the Dropbox desktop application is causing this? If you right click the Dropbox folder and choose 'Get info', how large is the folder? 

A screenshot of this, while hiding the username itself, would be great!

[oduibhir]

Hi Jay,

I mean, since I can't see what files are being written to the drive, no, I can't know for sure that the problem is Dropbox. The available storage was steady before I changed the status of the one sub-Dropbox folder and then it started going down. I did notice that it's size has not been changing so you may be right about it not being Dropbox causing the available size to continue to drop. I'll try changing a larger Dropbox folder to online-only and see if the available storage drops.

Here is a screenshot of the Get Info for the Dropbox root folder.

[Jay]

The size and size on disk are the same, which means that nothing has become online-only yet (the size on disk should be smaller).

Could you check to see if online-only files on Mac is enabled on this page?

[oduibhir]

Hi Jay,

Thanks for sticking with me on this.... My settings had online-only files on Mac set to Off. I switched it to On and then logged off the user and logged back in again to restart Dropbox. Interestingly. while on my other user on the same computer, I noticed that the hard drive space stopped going down when the user with Dropbox was logged off. 

I logged back on to the Dropbox user and noticed that the icons saying the folders were online-only were gone. I watched my disk space for a little bit and noticed that it wasn't changing anymore, so I set the same folder to online-only again. Immediately, the available disk space dropped instead of going up. I checked the individual files in that online-only folder and they say they take up zero bytes. However, the folder that they live in still says it is taking up the same amount of space as before I set it to online-only. My hard drive is now down to 115 gb from nearly 200 gb when I first set Dropbox to online-only. The available space continues to drop, albeit more slowly than it was last week.

[Walter]

Hey @oduibhir - sorry to jump in here, but, since you made some changes to the status of the files/folders, have you tried clearing the cache since you noticed this space discrepancy? 

[oduibhir]

Hi Walter,

Good idea. I did try that. There was only about 52mb in the cache but I put it in the trash and emptied the trash. The change in my available hard drive space was minimal and is still dropping.

Dropbox is now giving me messages that I'm about to run out of hard drive space. I'm loath to change any other Dropbox folders to online-only for fear that that will completely wipe out the remaining space. I have one folder on Dropbox that I haven't changed to online-only that has >43 gb in it. Would love to reclaim that space but...

[Hannah]

Hi from me as well, @oduibhir.

Can you try removing some large folders completely with selective sync, to see if that frees up their space?

You can add them back later; folders you unsync through selective sync and then choose to sync them again, will download as online-only, so if you add them back, they shouldn't take up space.