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Peter Marigold's avatar
Peter Marigold
Explorer | Level 3
2 years ago

Online only files still taking up space on hard drive!

I'm trying desperately to clear out my hard drive (so Photoshop can open!) and have made tons of folders and files 'online only' sometime ago.

 

However, when I inspect the the folders and files (I'm using the app Folder Size) these STILL take up space on my laptop. 

 

An example of one folder here is my 'Camera Uploads' which are entirely online only (the grey cloud icon), but still taking up 18gb of space. This is the case for all the folders that are 'online only'

 

Any idea what is going on here?

 

removed links 

 

TIA. 

desktop

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  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    2 years ago

    Hey @Peter Marigold, I hope you don't mind if I join the discussion!

     

    I wanted to point out something very important about the size of your files.

     

    If you go to the Dropbox folder in your file explorer and right click on an "online-only" folder and choose "properties", you will see the size of the folder, but if you take a closer look, right under "size", you'll see "size on disk"; that's the actual size of the folder on your hard drive.

     

    And that is because you made the folder online-only.

     

    If you were to right click on the same folder, choose to make it available offline, and follow the same steps, the "size on disk" number should show the same info as the "size" one. Can you confirm that's the case?

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