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CT 's avatar
CT
Helpful | Level 5
3 years ago

Dropbox is eating my hard drive space

Not sure what's going on here.

I recently deleted a bunch of old files off Dropbox and my computer.

This week, my hard drive space has been fluctuating by over 300GBs. Some times I'll go get a coffee with 300GB of space. Come back and I'm at 65GB. Then it starts counting back up. Very slowly.

 

I've manually deleted my Dropbox cache as this was the main problem I assumed.


Is there any way to limit this? The files I'm adding aren't that big at the moment but it's quite annoying just watching my hard drive space count down like a ticking time bomb.

 

I've never had this problem until this week and have been using dropbox for a solid 6+ years. Did Dropbox update and there's some weird problem?

desktop
Storage space

3 Replies

  • Walter's avatar
    Walter
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Hey ct, sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

     

    Could you please clarify the desktop app's exact status and version as shown in your menu bar/system tray at the moment? 

     

    If the app is up to date and not still syncing, you should be able to make up some hard drive space by clearing the app's cache as you correctly mentioned.

     

    If this keeps happening and you find yourself out of hard drive space often, have you considered using selective sync or make your files online only perhaps?

     

    Feel free to send along any additional information that might help our investigation here.

     

    Thanks!

     

  • CT 's avatar
    CT
    Helpful | Level 5
    3 years ago

    Thanks Walter,

     

    Files are all up to date/synced in the menu bar.

     

    I do use selective sync and have a fair amount of files set to online only, unless I'm using them.

     

    I was rendering some png sequences/mov's from c4d/After effects on my work computer to my Dropbox folder so I could access them at home. Which I've been doing for the past 4-5 years and never had the hard drive space drop as much as it did this week. 

    Once something is synced to my drive/home computer, would the cache clear itself of that file, or does it wait for the whole 500+ pngs to be synced? 

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