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I uninstalled Dropbox from my computer, but the Dropbox folder still takes up space on my hard drive
I use to have a dropbox account (using company email credentials) from a company I have worked for before and now after leaving the company and unistalling dropbox, my Win10 is still saying I have around 28GB on that work folder.
Another thing. When I go and right click on the dropbox folder and go to properties, its saying:
Size: 800GB
Size on disk: 28.4
Why do I have 2 different folder sizes?
And, how do I delete everything dropbox in my PC (Dropbox already uninstalled, I do not see it in apps)
Hey dups2788, thanks for joining our Community and happy Monday!
Uninstalling the Dropbox application, won't actually free up the space the Dropbox folder is taking up.
But if your computer has been unlinked from the account and Dropbox is uninstalled, you can delete the Dropbox folder from your computer, to free up that space.
The discrepancy is probably because you used to have most files set to online-only in your Dropbox folder.
That would turn them into placeholder files, with no physical size.
I hope this helps, but let me know if you have any questions.
18 Replies
- Rich
Super User II
Have you checked File Explorer to see if those folders still exist?
- Megan
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hey xMPWx, sorry to hear about that!
Have you successfully deleted your Dropbox folder too? Do you specifically see that your old Dropbox files take up space on the device?
Also, do you think it's possible to check your PC's settings > System > Storage and send me a couple of screenshots, please?
Keep me posted, and we'll take it from there!
I'm having the same problem, I unistalled the app and deleted the rest of what's left on my computer and it still shows that my computer hard drive it full. I don't get it.
- Nancy
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to ignore the online-only files all at once. Since you’ve uninstalled the Dropbox app from your device, the Dropbox folder behaves like a normal computer folder and the online-only files you see are placeholders of the original files you’d stored on the Dropbox server.
Since you don’t need them, you can select them locally and delete them, before trying to copy the remainder to your external hard drive.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. If I go in the Dropbox folder and highlight all the subfolders and try to copy them, I get the same error as before. There are too many files to copy them one by one. Is there any way to tell the folder to delete or stop keeping track of the online-only files? It looks like they're still showing up in the folders. When I view the properties of the individual files, they have a non-zero size (but 0 bytes on disk).
- Nancy
Thanks for these screenshots! From what I understand, your external drive calculates the original size of these folders and not the actual size that the files are taking up from your hard drive.
Instead of copying the entire Dropbox folders to your drive, can you open them instead and try to manually copy the content you wish to move over? Does that help?
Personal Dropbox Folder
Work Dropbox Folder
Error Message
