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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 coff...
desktop
Storage space
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? 

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

    Hi ct, do the files in question on your machine have a green circle with a white tick, or a white circle with a green tick on them?

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