We’re Still Here to Help (Even Over the Holidays!) - find out more here.
Forum Discussion
socksinacan
4 years agoExplorer | Level 4
External drive backup complete, but vast difference in sizes
I used Dropbox to backup my external drive with 520GB of content. The backup is complete and Dropbox says it's in sync, but the size of my back up is only 428GB. Such a discrepancy scares me. Is there some really good compression, deduplication, etc. being applied?
Thanks!
16 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- socksinacan4 years agoExplorer | Level 4Sure! That would be appreciated. Thank you!
- Jay4 years ago
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hi socksinacan, I've emailed you directly, could you reply to the email to assist further?
- _adamdunbar3 years agoExplorer | Level 3
I've got a similar discrepancy with all the external drives I'm backing up. Please can you share what causes this?
- Hannah3 years ago
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hey _adamdunbar, thanks for the nudge here.
Can you please let us know, which version of the Dropbox app you're running and what the sync status is?
You can hover over the Dropbox icon in your system tray/menu bar, to see this info.
Also, does your backup appear to be correct in your backups page online?
- _adamdunbar3 years agoExplorer | Level 3
I am running the latest version of DropBox backup. I literally downloaded and installed it 1-2 weeks ago.
Sync status for all three of my external drive backups show Done with a green tick.
The backup page in the online web ui shows a discrepancy in the sizes. E.g. the actual data on each drive is considerably more than the displayed size of each backup.
I also checked some of the folders and can clearly see data missing.
- Megan3 years ago
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hi _adamdunbar, thanks for the added info!
When you say that data is missing, do you refer to the online content, or locally?
Can you also send us a few screenshots of the discrepancy you see on each drive's data size, so we can have visual too?
About Create, upload, and share
Find help to solve issues with creating, uploading, and sharing files and folders in Dropbox. Get support and advice from the Dropbox Community.
The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.
If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.
For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.
If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!