We’re Still Here to Help (Even Over the Holidays!) - find out more here.
Forum Discussion
Mac Finder continues to show large size of Dropbox Folder despite everything being online-only
Hi, everyone. Thanks in advance for your help, wisdom, and support.
I have a problem several others have experienced, but none of the solutions I found here seem to be working. Simply put, I have around 300 GB in my Dropbox folder and have everything set to be online only (or so I assume?) Mac finder is still showing this 300 GB as being used, and it is affecting other uses that require a lot of space (video editing, audio sample packages, etc.) I do need that space back. "Space Lens" in CleanMyMac shows the proper amount of space used ( a bit under 500 GB of my 1TB built-in drive on my MacBook Pro M1.
Here are the specs: Macbook Pro M1; 16GB RAM; 1Tb drive
OS: Sonoma 14.5
Dropbox Desktop Version: 204.4.5420
I have searched the Dropbox folder for the ".dropbox.cache" file, but it does not exist. Here is a screenshot of the only files that appear after invoking "shift-command-.":
Here is a screenshot (blurred for privacy concerns) of what the folder's directory looks like. Unless I'm mistaken, shouldn't all of these files be online only?:
The Dropbox directory resides in the "Cloudstorage" in the Library, which is precisely where I believe it should be.
Any help or insight the community can offer would be tremendously appreciated. Many thanks in advance!
JS
26 Replies
In Disk Utility my harddisk is nearly full while the total volume of storage in other folders than Dropbox is nowhere near this amount. Because the size of the folders in Dropbox show a big size I am under the impression that my Mac somehow registers the total volume of files in Dropbox as used disk space while the files aren't downloaded to the disk.
Computer OS is Sequoia 15.3.1.
Dropbox version: 218.4348
- Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hey Ecnerwal, if your files are online-only (ie., they have the online-only icon) and the properties confirm that the physical space is 0kb for these files, then it seems that the feature works as it should from our side.
Some of the locations where you can see a file's size, will display the logical size, others the physical size.
An online-only file's placeholder takes up approximately 0kb, which is the physical size.
The logical size of the file is the actual size of the file, if it were downloaded to the device.
In other views of Finder, the OS will report the logical size, which is probably why you're seeing the behavior you're seeing.
I hope this helps!
Hi, if the files still take in disk space even if they're not downloaded what is the use of files on demand?
The file from the attached screenshot is not downloaded and still takes in disk space. So I assume that this disk space cannot be used for other files. What if the size of all Dropbox files exceeds my disk space?
When doing an online search about this I find a lot of people with the same problem without a solution.
Yes of course, do you have my email-address?
