Hidden .dropbox_bi folder storing 87GB of files locally!

Hey everyone, sorry for the delay here.

If you're still having this issue, can you please let us know, so we can send you an email?

Thanks!

To give an update on my experience. It seems Dropbox don't know what's going on and everything was a 'try it and see'. 

What seemed to work for us was to update the Mac with the issue to the latest Mac OS. After 36 hours the .dropbox_bi folder was only storing 55Mb. 

Dropbox were helpful in the process but I definitely believe they have no idea why the problem occurs. I wasted many hours on a problem that shouldn't exist.

Hi, i've had some issues with this when my external drive backup stopped working properly and started downloading everything to the dropbox_bi folder.  I'd appreciate any help you can provide to get it working again.  

Hey Anwick & BlackArtAudio, how are you today?

Do you maybe have an existing, open ticket with our Support? If not, shall I reach out to you there?

Thanks!

I had the same problem on a larger scale.   My .dropbox_bi file had exceeded 1T and filled the capacity of my Mac internal drive, making my system nearly unusable.   I have an external 10T RAID drive, so I began moving large folders and files to that drive to recover some space on my working drive.   Having cleared out over 80G, I watched while the .dropbox_bi file grew even larger, filling up the hard drive again.   I realized that I had set Dropbox to back up the external RAID drive, but that the contents of the RAID drive now exceeded my 2T dropbox limit.   By moving more files from my Mac drive onto the RAID drive, I was making the problem worse.   It appeared that Dropbox was using the .dropbox_bi file to temporarily store changes to my RAID drive when it was unable to save them on my Dropbox space.   I contacted Dropbox sales and coughed up the money to expand to 3T.   The RAID backup restarted almost immediately.   When it successfully finished, the .dropbox_bi file had gone from 1T to 27G.   Problem solved.

This is all very frustrating. I am only using 266GBs of 2TB on Dropbox, but still have this .dropbox_bi folder that seemly appeared overnight (wasn't an issue yesterday) that's 202GBs in size. How does @dropbox not know what the problem is? 

Hey JSA73, sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

Would you like me to send you an email to have a further look into this matter in more detail?

Hi Walter. I reached out to Dropbox via chat yesterday and opened a ticket. I was told that this is being looked into, but confirmed that it has something to do (in my case, anyway) with my recent addition of an external drive. Thanks for the response. Hopefully this is something that can be resolved quickly.

Thanks for the update and note that you can let me know your ticket ID so that I can look it up in our system too JSA73 

Hi Walter. It's #19660276

Hi JSA73, I can see that your ticket is being handled by a support agent. They'll be able to assist with more device-specific troubleshooting from there on.

Hi all,

I also got the same issue.

I always back-up my 4TB External Drive Data, but Dropbox fill my Internal Storage with the .dropbox_bi folder.

Then my mac is gone to unusable.

So I want to delete the .dropbox_bi folder, but is this the safe?

OS: macOS 12.5.1

model: Mac mini M1 20202

Hey jurilog, sorry to hear about this.

Would it be OK if we send you an email to have a further look internally?

Hi jurilog,

     Based on the guidance I got from Support, I disabled backup to my external drive in my Dropbox account and deleted the .dropbox_bi folder. This was last week and no issues since. Fortunately, I also have other cloud storage (iCloud, Google Drive, etc.) I can use until Dropbox is able to address the issue. That said, I highly encourage you to work with Dropbox Support before doing anything. Michael (my support guy) was extremely helpful and quick to investigate/respond. 

 I was trying to copy files off of an SD card and my computer said I was almost out of disk space.  After some investigating, I found the culprit!  I discovered that my hidden .dropbox_bi folder is using 1.094TB of my internal SSD on my iMac.  Can I delete it?  This is ridiculous!  HELP!

I had the same problem with my Windows 10 : 147 GB used by the .dropbox_bi folder, letting less than 1GB free on my C:\ drive...

I didn't even see .dropbox_bi appearing with my Windows Explorer and had to install "TreeSize Free" to have it appeared.

Based on the comments here, I killed the back-up process and deleted the .dropbox_bi structure with TreeSize.

Now, my system is working properly but I have no back-up of my 1TB external file anymore.

So thanks a lot for the advices here !

That being, I changed my account to Dropbox Plus to back-up my external drive and it is now useless.

So I hove Dropbox will solve that issue soon, otherwise I'll ask for a refund...

Hey rhythmdog, do you mind if we reach out to you via email, so we can look into this internally?

As for you, Jean-Marc P, I'm glad the issue got resolved, but I will definitely pass your comments along to our team about this.

Hannah:

Yes, please contact me about this issue.  Thanks!

Sorry for jumping in, rhythmdog. 

I’ve just logged a ticket for you. When you have some time, please reply back to me, and we’ll investigate this further. 

Thanks!

I am having the same issue with Windows 10Pro operating system.  

I have an external hard drive automatically backed up via Dropbox, but for some reason a hidden folder "Dropbox_BI " has been created and is utilizing 349GB of hard drive space on the machine that the external hard drive is connected to.  

I found the hard drive space being utilized via TreeSize disk space manager app.

I contacted Dropbox support, via chat, regarding this issue.  They let me know that Dropbox engineers are aware of the problem and are working on a solution, and that I would be contacted by Dropbox support staff soon.

Another update on this. The dropbox_bi folder on a Mac other than the one the large external drive is attached to now has over 500Gb of files under the label of the external drive attached to another computer!

Come on Dropbox, this is going on too long whilst waiting for a decent solution. And it's a solution the Dropbox engineers need to resolve as the first and second line customer service staff don't have a clue (not their fault).

I have the same issue, Win10Pro, My internal C: is completely full thx to the external drive rebound through the internal Dropbox apparently tries to do in the course of backups and this is actually a dangerous situation.  Support told me today to update the desktop app and it will fix (a little skeptical, but let's see).

As others have mentioned, I had to use that TreeSize utility to even find on my own that Dropbox was the culprit to my storage woes, because Windows disk utility doesn't show it and you pull your hair wondering where all the storage went.  That .dropbox_bi folder is hidden beyond hidden - even if you browse your directories to see "hidden" files it doesn't show up.  Which feels downright sneaky but maybe there's a reason - I can find the individual files in the .dropbox_bi by searching for them, it's just the stuff doesn't show up through normal windows explorer browsing.  I thought my internal hard drive was corrupted!!

Hey Anwick and bagofchips, sorry to see you're having an issue with this.

Can we actually reach out to you via email, so we can look further into this?

Hi Hannah, 

With respect, unless you're a Dropbox backend developer who understands the workings behind the scene then no, there's no point, it's a waste of my time and yours and I've wasted too much time on this problem so far. I've had email communications on this for a while now with various customer service personnel and all the suggested options are either not connected with this folder or they were actually guess work with 'wait and see'.