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

Hi Jay,

 

I have an update on the space... in the last half hour, all the sudden the available drive space jumped up from 116 gb to 192 gb! That's about how much space I thought I had freed up. I'm not sure why it would take so long to update. Now if I could only get all those changes back that I made this morning 🙂

 

John

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

Thanks for the update, it seems that it might have taken a little longer to free up the space on the machine for some reason. 

 

Regarding the Word document, are you certain it was in the Dropbox folder itself? Do you see the file on the Dropbox site, and on the events page?

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

    Hi Jay,

     

    If I look at Dropbox on the web, the file was there. When I saw that the file didn't update, that was the first place I looked. I agree that it sounds like it wasn't the same file but I don't keep the files any other place.

     

    It is saving now. What happens if a file is open, then I change the status of its folder to online-only while the file is still open? Would that cause it not to save?

     

    John

     

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

    It wouldn't be possible to mark files as online-only while you're on the file itself, since the file is already local during the editing process. 

     

    One small possibility is that Word was somehow finding the file in the Dropbox cache folder, which is only a temporary storage, and the file was then deleted during the clearing of the cache.

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