Dropbox uses a ton of hard drive space despite most files being online only

Hi Jay,

I encountered exactly the same issue - the dropbox take me 500GB hardrive space where the actual local file size is 200GB. I tried all the methods that you mentioned as above but it only free 12 GB which basically means nothing. 

This issue has been 1 year actually. I did all online research, keep dropbox and OS version up to date, but there isn't any improvement at all. 
Could you please your let your team look at this issue? I believe it's dropbox sofeware problem because I can see many users have the exactly same problem that cannot be solve. This is significantly affect the user experience. There is no point to use a cloud drive that take 3 times file size of the local drive. 

Thank you 

Hi again! On one of the screenshots you sent to Megan, I can see that your Dropbox folder contains about 360K files (in general, the performance of the app may decline above ~300K files).

Besides making your files online-only, there’s also the selective sync feature (showing on your last screenshot), which totally removes some folders from your Dropbox app and you can then access them online. Can you please give it a go for one or two folders and let me know if you see any difference at all?

Hi Megan,

I had also tried the following from the Help Center on the Dropbox website:

But I don't see the New files default option either:

Hi Megan,

Yes, I've tried both. I even uninstalled Dropbox and reinstalled it. Is there anything else I can try?

Have you tried signing out of the app, and then back in or even rebooting your device at all eroberts?

Hi Megan,

Please see attached. Also, no, I don't see any syncing icons. I was looking for this when I first started this process to determine the status by file/folder, but didn't see any.

Hey eroberts, let me also jump in here! 

Would you be able to send me another screenshot of the Dropbox folder's properties, just to check what's going on there? 

Also, when you access your folders inside the Dropbox folder, do you see any syncing icons there? 

Hi Nancy,

Thanks for getting back to me. It's not that, we have a ton of space in the cloud. It has something to do with the sync function because it is literally downloading all of the files we have in Dropbox which I don't need on my desktop. This is simpler in OneDrive, because all I do is select online only or free up space and it frees up the space. I'm not sure why through Dropbox this is so much harder. It's especially confusing because it tells me it has successfully transferred the files online when it hasn't.Lots of space

Thanks for those screenshots! Now, if I got it right, it looks like both your Dropbox account and your hard drive are full. 

Can you go here and send me one more screenshot of what you see? 

If your Dropbox account is indeed full, the first step will be to either remove some files from your account online or get more Dropbox space to sync the extra files.

In any case, if your Dropbox account is full, then your Dropbox app won’t sync either, which may be the reason why you don’t see the online-only option.

Let me know if I misunderstood something though.

Hi Nancy,

Please see attached. It stopped syncing, informing me that the Dropbox is full and I need to clear files. I had tried clearing the cache several times and this didn't make sense at first because I was getting these messages but there weren't many files in the cache. On about the 5th time, I noticed some files were in the old_files folder and I cleared those and some space was freed up. However, the next day, it filled right back up again. I then checked the cache again and only 34.2 MB of space is being used. The old_files folder is also still empty.manage hard drive space - fulldropbox status even after running manage hard drive spaceno online only option on right clickmanage hard drive space - cleareddropbox versiondrive full even after running manage hard drive space