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. 

[oduibhir]

Hi Hannah and thanks for the suggestion.

I made the change you suggested about 75 minutes ago, unchecking two folders in selective sync. Together, those two folders had about 34 gb in them. The available space initially dropped a little but then started going in the right direction. At the peak, I got about 4 gb of space back. However, since then, it's been going back down again and I'm now less than 1 gb ahead of where I was when I set those two folders to selective sync. I never got anywhere close to the 34 gb back. Those folders have disappeared from Finder on my Mac.

[Jay]

Since you've enabled the online-only option on the site, could you now try marking folders as local, and then as online-only to see if this helps?

A screenshot showing the folders as they appear in Finder (while hiding any personal names and info) would also help to determine if they're online-only.

[oduibhir]

Hi Jay,

Here are a couple screenshots of folders that are online-only. The numbers look pretty good. The one that is taking up 3 mb on my local drive, takes up 31.7 gb on Dropbox. The one that takes up 26.7 mb takes up 5.6 gb on Dropbox. It' frustrating because the changes I've made to Dropbox should have freed up 31.7 gb + 5.6 gb + 33.3 gb but my computer actually is showing less free space now than it did when I started this process.Is 5.6 gb on DropboxIs 31.7 gb on Dropbox

[Jay]

Since it looks like Dropbox is freeing up space as you mentioned, this issue might related to some other app or service on your machine. 

If you quit the Dropbox desktop application entirely, does the free space continue to decrease?

[oduibhir]

Hi Jay,

Sorry if this is a lot of information... I run two users on my computer almost all the time - one is a work user and one is a personal user. The personal user doesn't have Dropbox. When both users are running I can see the available disk space dropping no matter which user I'm working in. If I logout of the work user so that Dropbox is no longer running, the disk space stops dropping. I realize that isn't conclusive but it does demonstrate that if Dropbox isn't running, the available disk space stops dropping.

I'm now becoming very concerned about what is going on with Dropbox. I spent the entire morning working on a document that is in a folder on Dropbox. I saved the file multiple times during the morning and never received an error message. The indiction in Microsoft Word that a file is either saved or unsaved, always changed to the saved state. However, at lunch, Microsoft had an update to Word to install so I quit Word. When I came back and opened the file using Recent Files, none of the changes I made was still there.

John

[oduibhir]

Hi Jay,

I have an update on the space... in the last half hour, all the sudden the available drive space jumped up from 116 gb to 192 gb! That's about how much space I thought I had freed up. I'm not sure why it would take so long to update. Now if I could only get all those changes back that I made this morning 🙂

John

[Jay]

Thanks for the update, it seems that it might have taken a little longer to free up the space on the machine for some reason. 

Regarding the Word document, are you certain it was in the Dropbox folder itself? Do you see the file on the Dropbox site, and on the events page?

[oduibhir]

Hi Jay,

If I look at Dropbox on the web, the file was there. When I saw that the file didn't update, that was the first place I looked. I agree that it sounds like it wasn't the same file but I don't keep the files any other place.

It is saving now. What happens if a file is open, then I change the status of its folder to online-only while the file is still open? Would that cause it not to save?

John

[Jay]

It wouldn't be possible to mark files as online-only while you're on the file itself, since the file is already local during the editing process. 

One small possibility is that Word was somehow finding the file in the Dropbox cache folder, which is only a temporary storage, and the file was then deleted during the clearing of the cache.