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How do I stop Dropbox from auto moving files to online-only?
Last night, I accidentally caused my disk free space to go below 5GB. Dropbox decided to silently move all files to cloud and deleted all local copies, keeping just "links" (names a cloud+downward arrow icon next to it), WITHOUT notifying me!!! This happened without my knowledge and cause a few other apps that depends on files in dropbox folders to fail. They expect physical files, not dropbox links. It took me some time to find out what had happened. And while I was freeing up disk space, a tug of war between dropbox and me happened: I click the cloud button to download the files, the apps would work for a while, before dropbox would remove them from disk again. As a result of this mess of download, delete, sync, and write, some data was damaged and lost. (A few files have their dropbox history lost as well, they just have "Something went wrong" on dropbox website).
This was incredibly frustrating. Dropbox should not be optimizing for my disk space w/o my knowledge or even letting me know. If the disk is running out of my space, it should be my OS warning me, or at least WARN me before pulling something like this.
I'm on v200.4.7134 and macOS 12.7.5
How do I turn this "smart" feature off? Afaik, this could happen tomorrow if I accidentally download something big. I know dropbox has the setting "How do you want to store new files?" That's about new files though. Can dropbox be set to NEVER remove local files? (For the sake of completeness, after I realized what dropbox did, I switched this setting to "available offline", but dropbox was still removing files from disk).
Thank you!
6 Replies
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi donoharm, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
If you right click the Dropbox folder itself and mark it as available offline, this will force all files to download and remain on your computer.
You can also set the default setting in the Dropbox desktop application preferences.
If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.
Hello,
Thanks for replying. What is the default setting? "How do you want to store new files?" It says that setting won't affect new files.
This is my setting page:
- Walter
The default setting is the policy that will be followed for your files in the Dropbox folder donoharm
The part that says it won't affect new files is referring to the online only option.
For more information about the version of the desktop app you're using, you can have a look here.
I hope this helps!
