Forum Discussion

oduibhir's avatar
oduibhir
Explorer | Level 3
3 years ago

Local storage decreasing when I set folders to online-only

I need to free up space on my iMac's local drive. I set one folder on my Dropbox drive to online-only and instead of freeing up space, I'm watching it slowly eat up the local drive. The folder I set ...
desktop
Storage space
sync
Jay's avatar
Jay
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
3 years ago

Hi oduibhir, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

 

Could you try clearing the cache folder to see if this helps?

 

Keep me updated with any progress!

oduibhir's avatar
oduibhir
Explorer | Level 3
3 years ago

Thank you for responding Jay. I dragged the sub-folders in the cache folder to the trash (but did not empty the trash). The available space on my local drive continues to go down at a pretty rapid pace. I'm down about 2.5 gb now.

 

John

  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Are you certain that the Dropbox desktop application is causing this? If you right click the Dropbox folder and choose 'Get info', how large is the folder? 

     

    A screenshot of this, while hiding the username itself, would be great!

    • oduibhir's avatar
      oduibhir
      Explorer | Level 3
      3 years ago

      Hi Jay,

       

      I mean, since I can't see what files are being written to the drive, no, I can't know for sure that the problem is Dropbox. The available storage was steady before I changed the status of the one sub-Dropbox folder and then it started going down. I did notice that it's size has not been changing so you may be right about it not being Dropbox causing the available size to continue to drop. I'll try changing a larger Dropbox folder to online-only and see if the available storage drops.

       

      Here is a screenshot of the Get Info for the Dropbox root folder.

       

       

      • Jay's avatar
        Jay
        Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
        3 years ago

        The size and size on disk are the same, which means that nothing has become online-only yet (the size on disk should be smaller).

         

        Could you check to see if online-only files on Mac is enabled on this page?

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