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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 ...
Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorAre 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!
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
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?
Hi Jay,
Thanks for sticking with me on this.... My settings had online-only files on Mac set to Off. I switched it to On and then logged off the user and logged back in again to restart Dropbox. Interestingly. while on my other user on the same computer, I noticed that the hard drive space stopped going down when the user with Dropbox was logged off.
I logged back on to the Dropbox user and noticed that the icons saying the folders were online-only were gone. I watched my disk space for a little bit and noticed that it wasn't changing anymore, so I set the same folder to online-only again. Immediately, the available disk space dropped instead of going up. I checked the individual files in that online-only folder and they say they take up zero bytes. However, the folder that they live in still says it is taking up the same amount of space as before I set it to online-only. My hard drive is now down to 115 gb from nearly 200 gb when I first set Dropbox to online-only. The available space continues to drop, albeit more slowly than it was last week.
- Walter
Hey oduibhir - sorry to jump in here, but, since you made some changes to the status of the files/folders, have you tried clearing the cache since you noticed this space discrepancy?
