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Forum Discussion

Danudod's avatar
Danudod
Explorer | Level 3
2 months ago

Dropbox files consuming hard drive space even after switching files to online-only

Hello All, My Dropbox is consuming a lot of space on my local drive because the files are available offline. Recently, I marked all folders as "Online-Only," and I initially recovered about 40 GB o...
desktop
Storage space
Windows
Danudod's avatar
Danudod
Explorer | Level 3
2 months ago

Hello Nancy,
Yes, I experienced that with some folders. When I made them online-only, they reverted back to local after a few seconds.

What do you mean by third-party apps—Office apps or something specific? Users mostly utilize Office apps and access the files through them.

Let me know if there's any workaround for this, or if we have to keep them local only.

Jay's avatar
Jay
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
2 months ago

Hi Danudod​, yes, my colleague was referring to other programs on the computer that might try to access those files, or the folders they're within, which would then make the files local again.

Some security software can do this too if attempting to scan files for viruses. 

You can test this out to see what programs are causing this change by doing the following:

  1. Quitting every open app and service via the system tray, apart from the Dropbox app
  2. Mark some files as online-only in Explorer, and confirm that the cloud icon appears
  3. Wait to see that the files remain with a cloud icon
  4. While keeping the Explorer window open, open one of your background apps
  5. Check the sync status of the online-only files in that open Explorer window
  6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 until you find a program that makes those files local

 

Bearing in mind your comments in your other thread, since this sounds different to using selective sync, I just want to make sure that our wires aren't getting crossed somewhere.

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