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nsbcmedia's avatar
nsbcmedia
Explorer | Level 4
8 years ago
Solved

Smart Sync Online Only Files still using disc space

I am using smart sync on multiple Macs, one running macos 10.12.6 and the other running macos 10.14, they both are showing my hard disks are almost full even though the majority of the files are set ...
sync
  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    8 years ago
    On the Smart Sync page, it states the following:
     
    “On APFS, the operating system takes snapshots of the file system and available hard drive space. These snapshots may not update after you've used Smart Sync to set Dropbox files as online only. This means that hard drive space you freed up with Smart Sync may not be immediately reflected or available if this snapshot hasn't updated.
     
    “This hard drive space should eventually be freed up by the OS, but the amount of time this will take can vary. This isn't a behavior specific to Dropbox, but instead the designed behavior of macOS.”
     
    If Apple didn’t suggest this possibility to you, then I’m not sure what else I can say. 
     
    Users have reported these issues in the past, however the problems went away, presumably because the snapshots of the hard drive changed, which are essentially Time Machine snapshots.
     
    This issue occurred even on older versions of macOS, and yet the issues stopped after some time.
     
    I can only recommend checking with Apple again, given this information.
Jay's avatar
Jay
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
8 years ago
On the Smart Sync page, it states the following:
 
“On APFS, the operating system takes snapshots of the file system and available hard drive space. These snapshots may not update after you've used Smart Sync to set Dropbox files as online only. This means that hard drive space you freed up with Smart Sync may not be immediately reflected or available if this snapshot hasn't updated.
 
“This hard drive space should eventually be freed up by the OS, but the amount of time this will take can vary. This isn't a behavior specific to Dropbox, but instead the designed behavior of macOS.”
 
If Apple didn’t suggest this possibility to you, then I’m not sure what else I can say. 
 
Users have reported these issues in the past, however the problems went away, presumably because the snapshots of the hard drive changed, which are essentially Time Machine snapshots.
 
This issue occurred even on older versions of macOS, and yet the issues stopped after some time.
 
I can only recommend checking with Apple again, given this information.
nsbcmedia's avatar
nsbcmedia
Explorer | Level 4
8 years ago

But I as I stated originally I am also having the same issue with a different mac running OS 10.12.6 which does not use APFS but instead still runs in OS Extended (Journaled). While that might explain the issue on my newer laptop running 10.14 it does not explain the issue on my mac pro running Sierra. 

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