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Hidden .dropbox_bi folder storing 87GB of files locally!
Hi, I've just recently set up a new Dropbox Professional account. After installing the desktop app on my Mac I also set up a backup of my external SSD, which completed successfully yesterday.
Standard Dropbox file sync seems to be working fine, and the Dropbox app says everything is up to date, but for some reason I now have a new hidden folder under my Mac user folder called .dropbox_bi. That folder is storing 87GB of files on my primary SSD, apparently related to the 220GB of data backed up from the external SSD.
Is this my life now? Or is there some way to recover that massive waste of precious primary SSD storage space?
Hi bea1356, if you're still being affected by this, please try the following steps:
- Navigate to https://dropbox.com/backup/all. You should see a page listing all of your active backups.
- Any affected external drive backups will have an adjacent icon indicating that there are restored files.
- Turn off automatic backup for each of these backups from the backup management UI:
- Open the Dropbox tray on your computer.
- Under “Sync and backups”, click on the affected backup. You should now see a page for managing the backup.
- Scroll down to the “Adjust settings” section.
- Find the “Automatically back up drive” slider.
- Turn the slider to off. This will pause automatic backup.
- Repeat for each affected backup.
- You should see free space on your computer start to go up.
- Wait until free space on your computer has stabilized. This may take 30 minutes or more.
- Turn on automatic backup for the affected external drive backups from the backup management UI.
- Open the Dropbox tray on your computer.
- Under “Sync and backups”, click on the affected backup. You should now see a page for managing the backup.
- Scroll down to the “Adjust settings” section.
- Find the “Automatically back up drive” slider.
- Turn the slider to on to resume automatic backup.
- Repeat for each affected backup.
- Return to https://dropbox.com/backup/all
- In the affected backups, you will find a folder containing any restored files. Verify that your backup already contains the files in this folder, then go ahead and delete it.
Keep me posted with any updates!
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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.
- Megan
Dropbox Community Moderator
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?
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.
Hi Walter. It's #19660276
