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Dropbox cache maybe not emptying and I can't find the Dropbox cache folder on Mac
UPDATE: I rewrote the post as I gathered more information. I'm a MacBook Pro 2019 user, OS Sonoma 14.2.1. I don't know where to retrive my Dropbox version, but it should be up to date as I alway...
Here I report the solution I have come up with.
I found out this similar post, then I installed CleanMyMac and tried a Space Lens scan. I found the most of the weight was located at this path:
Library -> Group Containers folder -> G7HH3F8CAK.com.getdropbox.dropbox.sync
and further down till the file_clones folder. I searched for what is this on the net and I found this other post. I still don't fully understand what this folder contains, but I deleted its content. The used space immediately plummeted from 222 GB to 123 GB, and all run smoothly since.
Now, while this seems to work, there are many things that puzzle me:
1. What this folder is? What does it contains?
2. CleanMyMac quantified its content as 379 GB. Indeed, in manually deleting its content I counted dozens and dozens and dozens of GB. But how can this folder contain such a huge amount of files if my hard disk has a total size of 250 GB?
3. Why doesn't this folder empty automatically? This sounds like a bug to me.
Thanks,
Vanni
Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHey vrovera, so basically, on the Dropbox for macOS on File Provider version of the app, a cache folder is not needed/created any more, that's why you can't access it.
It might sometimes be created for certain user actions in the app, in which case you'd be able to find it in ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/.dropbox.cache
However, if you don't have the folder, it basically doesn't need to be cleared anyway.
Ok Hannah, which basically means I have no way to manage my cache. It may be unnecessary, as you said, but this let me uncomfortable. In fact this time the problem was with the folder G7HH3F8CAK.com.getdropbox.dropbox.sync, which I still don't understand what is (see my unanswered questions above), but which sounds to me pretty similar to some kind of cache. And this folder isn't emptying automatically, and it needs to be managed someway. I was forced to install CleanMyMac, a software which is neither Apple nor DropBox, in order to fix the problem. This seems unfair to me, it seems to be conceptually wrong, and ultimately some degree of control on these cache-like folders would be useful, provided that they seem to not working properly sometimes.
