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I only have 750GB synced on my 1TB external drive, but it keeps getting full.
I bought a Mac Mini earlier this year and as most Mac Mini owners, the internal drive is too small. So I added a 1TB SSD to a Acasis case (the mini Mac Pro lookalike-case) and followed all the instructions on how to move the Dropbox folder to the external drive.
Since then it's been a nightmare. My Dropbox account has about 1,5 TB in it so I don't sync everything but my music folder has to be synced since I'm a DJ. So I have maybe 750GB on the 1TB drive.
But after a week Dropbox stopped working and syncing. And the SSD was full. Very weird. Restarts and re-installation of the Dropbox app didn't help. I had to remove files from the drive and then it started indexing, registering and syncing again. But I had to, again, select which folders not to have 'offline'.
It worked for a week or two, then the same problem. Again. Exactly the same. Solved it the same way. Worked for a couple of weeks. It's getting a bit tired.
It looks like the only way to solve this would be to get a bigger SSD, at least 2TB.
15 Replies
- Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
Thanks for the reply, lowenhamn.
Let's try to gather some more info so we can troubleshoot this accordingly.
Can you let me know what your computer's exact OS version is?
Also, which version of the Dropbox app are you using and what is the exact sync status of the app?
You can see this info by hovering over the Dropbox icon in your menu bar.
And do you have any third party apps that might be accessing the files in question?
It is always connected, since it's in a case containing the Mac Mini, but I guess there could always be a few seconds for it to connect on a restart. But since this feature is made for external drives, I'm sure that has been accounted for in the code?
Not sure if this is what you were after.
I had som other files on the drive, but that's not the problem.
I had more than 250 GB available, but the next day the drive was full and Dropbox had stopped working. It's like the app decided to download lots of files that were marked as Online only.
And even if I were to access some online only files, they were not hundreds of GBs.
And the same thing has happened three times now. I have tried marking the folders Online only both in the Preferences and by right-clicking on the folder.
No other major changes were done to my Dropbox files, to trigger a sudden download.
I've been using Dropbox for a very long time, and always on 2-3 Macs at the same time, but never experienced much of a problem. This feels like the feature left beta testing way too early.
- Nancy
Thanks for posting about this on our forum, lowenhamn!
Can you send me a screenshot of your external drive’s usage, so that I can take a look? Besides the 750GB that were initially taken up by Dropbox, did you have any other files stored on your external drive, that could be using the rest of its space?
Similarly, did you try to access any other Dropbox files that weren’t syncing locally on your desktop app at the time, and they started syncing afterwards? You can double check this by looking at the syncing icons next to your Dropbox files.
Finally, feel free to send me a screenshot of any error messages you may be getting from Dropbox, as well.
Keep me updated.
