Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Does Dropbox create local copies of uploaded files?
My Macbook's 4TB was full. I decided to free 2TB of data on my computer; I first made a backup, uploading that 2TB to Dropbox. I then deleted the 2 TB of data from my computer. However, my compute...
I received a confirmation message: "Success! You've saved 1.89 TB of hard drive space"". But two problems:
Did you wait long enough for the Dropbox app to stop syncing and say that it was up to date (hover your cursor over the icon in your menu bar)? I wouldn't restart immediately after doing this as the application is likely still working in the background.
Mark the files as Online-only again and wait a bit for everything to catch up. 2GB is a lot of data to process and the process isn't instant. If you still don't see the space reclaimed after a while and your files are still marked as Online-only, check the hidden .dropbox.cache folder. The cache folder often hangs on to deleted files, temporarily, to aid in rapid recovery. Just make sure Dropbox is reporting as up to date before clearing it, otherwise whatever sync is in progress will likely have to start over when you clear the cache.
Thank you. This is remarkably helpful.
I went ahead made nearly the entire 2TB contents of my Dropbox folder "Online-only".
I received a confirmation message: "Success! You've saved 1.89 TB of hard drive space"".
But two problems:
- My Macbook is still showing that its 4 TB of storage is full. Perhaps that is for some unrelated reason but I think it's due to Dropbox; when I click "Get Info" on the Dropbox folder, the window that opens for the Dropbox folder still reads "1.97 TB on disk".
- I rebooted my computer. The 1.89 TB of data that I made online-only was no longer "online-only".
How can I clear the 1.89 TB off my hard drive and clear it permanently, while retaining a backup on Dropbox?
Many thanks again for the very helpful answer!
Rich
Super User II
Super User III received a confirmation message: "Success! You've saved 1.89 TB of hard drive space"". But two problems:
Did you wait long enough for the Dropbox app to stop syncing and say that it was up to date (hover your cursor over the icon in your menu bar)? I wouldn't restart immediately after doing this as the application is likely still working in the background.
Mark the files as Online-only again and wait a bit for everything to catch up. 2GB is a lot of data to process and the process isn't instant. If you still don't see the space reclaimed after a while and your files are still marked as Online-only, check the hidden .dropbox.cache folder. The cache folder often hangs on to deleted files, temporarily, to aid in rapid recovery. Just make sure Dropbox is reporting as up to date before clearing it, otherwise whatever sync is in progress will likely have to start over when you clear the cache.
