Dropbox fills up my hard drive on Mac OS

Hi from me as well, tholmes33.

The best way to go about this would be to separate the files in batches, upload one batch, make it online-only and then continue with the next one.

It might not be ideal, but for the files to actually sync to the account, they initially need to be in their original form and take up hard drive space.

I hope this helps.

tholmes33 wrote:

However, I have over 2TBs of footage I need to upload on my team's dropbox account. How do I upload that without it taking up space on my main HD ...

In short, you can't, at least not all at once. If your intent is to copy all 2TB into the Dropbox folder so it can sync to your team, then you need 2TB of space available on your local drive. The Dropbox folder is just a regular folder like any other. It's not a cloud-only folder where data you copy to it never touches your local drive. Anything in the folder takes up local disk space unless you mark it as Online-only, but you can only do that after the data has been copied to the folder and synced with Dropbox.

A way around that would be to add data in batches, up to as much as your drive will hold, and mark it as Online-only after the sync has completed. Doing so would remove that batch of data from your local drive, making room for the next batch.

Start by creating a folder in your Dropbox. Move a portion of the footage into that folder and wait for it to sync to your account online. Once the sync is done, right-click the folder and mark it as Online-only. Again, wait for the sync to finish as it removes those files from your local drive. Once complete, move the next portion of the footage into the folder and repeat the process.

An alternative to this would be to create a folder in your Dropbox and use Selective Sync to completely remove it from your local drive. This leaves the folder in your account online, but not on your computer. Then use the Dropbox website to manually upload files directly into that folder. This is a much slower process and prone to failure with large amounts of data, and with no option to resume if there's a problem.

And if you want a third-party solution, again start by creating a folder and removing is using Selective Sync. Then use something like Cyberduck or Mountain Duck to upload files directly into the folder online.