Dropbox app fills up entirely the local iPhone storage

Hey Vincehood, thanks for letting us know about this.

Can you send us a screenshot from your settings, showing this behavior?

Have you also tried clearing up the cache/offloading the app from the device's settings?

And if you completely remove the Dropbox app, does the issue go away?

Let me know what you find.

Hello Hannah

>> Can you send us a screenshot from your settings, showing this behavior?

see attached pictures above showing the Dropbox app settings on the iPhone

Have you also tried clearing up the cache/offloading the app from the device's settings?

>> If you mean, click on the gear icon in the Dropbox IOS app + Clear cache -> Yes, I have done it

And if you completely remove the Dropbox app, does the issue go away?

>> Yes, I came to the conclusion that the Dropbox is the one filling the phone local storage. So when I remove it + restart the phone, the problem is gone  (I get back the storage earlier used by the Dropbox app) but I have no Dropbox solution then...

By the way I noticed the same problem on another iPhone we have (iPhone 8+ with IOS 16.0.2 + latest Dropbox client)

Thanks

Thanks for the screenshots, Vince!

Can you also please go to the phone's Settings > General > iPhone storage > Dropbox and send us a screenshot of what you see there?

Hello Hannah 

This picture shows the status before I install or configure the Dropbox client on the Iphone (6.7G of free space):

These 2 pictures show where I end up after running Dropbox sync for a few minutes:

Dropbox takes more or less all the space left and stops its sync complaining about lack of space...

Hi Vincehood, in general, if you have camera uploads enabled, the Dropbox mobile app would need extra space on your device to assist with caching and uploading those images to Dropbox itself. 

Are any of the images on the phone being uploaded automatically via the app?

Hello Jay 

I understand the cache need for extra space but it seems that the cache keeps growing as sync executes.

It looks like a few pictures are getting through as sync executes until the phone storage is completely filled

Do you have the Dropbox desktop application installed? If you connect the phone manually, you can enable the desktop version of the camera uploads, which uses a different process.

It'll re-upload the previous images that have already been uploaded (since the desktop and mobile app use different methods), and once the images are all in the Dropbox folder and synced to the site, you could (if you wish) delete the images from the phone to free up space.

Hi Jay 

thanks for the suggestion.

Yes I also use the Dropbox app on my MacBook.

I agree I could do that as a work around but I would really like to have a convenient "wireless" solution not implying that I need to become some kind of storage admin for my wife mobile phone 😉

Then this could imply the creation of a lot of duplicates since I don't know how many/which pictures have already been uploaded (I have to admit I miss a solution for sorting out / organising my pictures in a semi automated fashion...)

/Vincent

Yes, my suggestion was only to ensure that the images were taken off the phone this one time, since the app isn't working normally. 

After that, once the images are gone, you can return to using the mobile app, since there would be no old images to fill up the cache.

Aside from that, the only other method would be to let the app continue uploading from the phone slowly