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jonps's avatar
jonps
New member | Level 2
3 years ago
Solved

Dropbox using a lot of storage even with Smart sync on

I installed the Dropbox desktop app on my laptop and activated smart sync before I started syncing files.

When I started the sync process, the app started downloading all files and kept them locally, even though I marked all files as online-only. In the end, dropbox had downloaded over 200gb out of a total 300gb.

I understand that the smart sync and online-only functionality still takes some space, but taking up over 200gb seems a bit excessive....

Have I missed something?

  • I'll answer my own question, I started looking through my files and discovered that for some reason, all zip files, and some other random files and filetypes was downloaded, after manually selecting a few files and select "Online-only", it refused to delete them and kept them as local files.

     

    Reinstalling the dropbox app seems to have fixed the issue, dropping total used space from 200gb to around 2gb, which is a HUGE improvement.

  • jonps's avatar
    jonps
    New member | Level 2

    I'll answer my own question, I started looking through my files and discovered that for some reason, all zip files, and some other random files and filetypes was downloaded, after manually selecting a few files and select "Online-only", it refused to delete them and kept them as local files.

     

    Reinstalling the dropbox app seems to have fixed the issue, dropping total used space from 200gb to around 2gb, which is a HUGE improvement.

  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

    Hey jonps, thanks for reaching out to our Community!

     

    I'm glad that reinstalling the Dropbox app helped you resolve this issue and your hard drive space was eventually freed up.

     

    If you have any other issues or questions, do let us know.

     

    Have a great day!

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