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Online only files taking up space on Windows
I have an 8Tb drive where I store my dropbox files on my Windows computer and despite setting all files to be 'online only' as well as going to Dropbox preferences and setting select sync to not sync...
Heyo Megan,
Sorry for the delayed response. Last week I tried deleting a bunch of files on the internal drive however Dropbox still gave me the error (however I'm not sure if I completely quit and restarted Dropbox then).
Since then I uninstalled dropbox completely, and the second I did that a bunch of 'ghost' dropbox files appeared (I'm using 'ghost' cause I don't know what else to call them, my computer thinks they're taking up space even though I can't open them and they are unreadable). My computer thought these dropbox files were taking up >100Tb of space (see attached picture) which is impossible on my 8Tb drive. The size of 110Tb does make sense given it's from my business partner's shared folder and we have a lot of data on there, however to my knowledge none of those shared folders were ever downloaded or selected to be synced on this drive.
I've since then gone through and deleted most of these 'ghost' files (some 400Gb of them couldn't be deleted as the app kept crashing when I tried to do so).
I believe these ghost files (which had never showed up on my computer before) were the primary reason for my computer/dropbox to think there was space being taken up. I know this was a problem on Mac (in terms of offline files appearing to take up space), is there a way to fix this on Windows? I would love to reinstall dropbox but worry that it will take over my computer again.
Thanks for any help!
Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHey IsaacGaz, sorry to jump in to your conversation with Megan.
This is a strange issue to happen on a Windows computer, indeed and definitely not a known one.
May I ask, is your 'E' drive an internal or external drive?
And what happens now, if you reinstall Dropbox and switch the folder to online-only again?
This is a strange issue to happen on a Windows computer, indeed and definitely not a known one.
May I ask, is your 'E' drive an internal or external drive?
And what happens now, if you reinstall Dropbox and switch the folder to online-only again?
Hey Hannah thanks for jumping in!
My E drive is internal. When I tried reinstalling dropbox and having the folders online (after a couple days of waiting for Dropbox to sync) I ran into the same error "cannot sync not enough disk space", however there's still several terrabytes of free space on the disk.
I thought for a second it might be because the disk is damaged, however when I ran some repair software it said it wasn't. I'll look more into this (maybe uninstall Dropbox and reinstall it on a different disk).Do you know if there's anything that can be done on the Dropbox end?
