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storingfilesforbackups25's avatar
storingfilesforbackups25
Explorer | Level 4
7 months ago
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...
desktop
Mac
Storage space
  • Rich's avatar
    Rich
    7 months ago
    storingfilesforbackups25 wrote:

    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.

Megan's avatar
Megan
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
7 months ago

Hi storingfilesforbackups25, happy to see that your issue is now resolved!

If you need something else, please let me know and we will be more than happy to help every step of the way. 😇

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