You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
MacOS Dropbox folder location change and free disk space discrepancy
Apparently Apple started requiring File Providers like Dropbox to move their folders to ~user/library/cloudstorage, leaving only a folder alias at the original location. This caused problems in the b...
Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHey VaughanS, thanks for posting to the Dropbox Community and happy Monday!
Regarding the Dropbox folder location on the new Dropbox for macOS version of the Dropbox app, changing the location of your Dropbox folder is no longer supported due to a requirement from Apple that all cloud storage provider folders be moved to the user’s Library folder.
However, I believe you'll find some useful info on this here.
About your storage space, is your Dropbox folder currently set to online-only?
Or do you also have files that are available offline, which appear to not take up hard drive space?
Keep me posted.
Thanks for your reply, Hannah. I knew about the storage provider requirements from Apple. I was just surprised that a new installation of dropbox on a new computer placed the default dropbox folder directly in the users folder and not in library/cloudstorage. Looking at the dropbox preferences on this new installation, it looks as though it has reverted to the dropbox system before Apple changed the requirements. I'm changing this now. And you were right. The files were set to online only, despite my thinking that it was set to be available online. I'm changing this, too. After all this is completed, I'll let you know about how the two Finder utilities report the free disk space.
I meant offline. Sorry!
OK, all's updated and works well. I'm still curious why Finder reports 171 GB of free disk space and PathFinder 133.5 GB.
The dropbox folder in cloudstorage is 47.1 GB so that only partially accounts for the free space difference. Disk Utility also reports 133.5 GB free. What's the problem with the Mac Finder?
I just realized that it also installs to the home dir without creating the symlink to `cloudstorage` like the previous version. Did you find the answer yet?
