Dropbox generating excessive cache files

[Whitecold]

I have an issue with Dropbox 166.4.2920 on macOS 12.0.1

Dropbox keeps generating utterly excessive cache files, 114GB currently on a folder that has 3.3GB of actual contents. How can I force Dropbox to clear its cache in a reasonable timeframe and not keep accumulating this?

[Whitecold]

I deleted the cache folder, and in the last few hours again 40GB appeared, with the computer just idling.

[Jay]

Hi @Whitecold, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Have you enabled full disk access on your Mac for the Dropbox extension?

Have you enabled any other Dropbox features such as the computer backup or external drive backup?

This will help me to assist further!

[Whitecold]

I don't use any other features, but the disk access was not clicked. I now enabled full disk access, I'll report if the problem persists.

[Whitecold]

So Dropbox again wrote 15GB of data into the cache. It seems to be all in the .dropbox.cache/old_files folder.

[Nancy]

Thanks for updating us on this, @Whitecold. 

Can you please clarify what’s your desktop app’s syncing status at the moment? 

Also, when did you start encountering this issue? Did you recently delete/upload a large number of files to your Dropbox account perhaps?

[Whitecold]

Dear Nancy,

Dropbox reports that all files are up to date. I don't know when exactly it started, I saw it previously, then I just deleted the cache, but now it seems to be recurring. There's no special activity going on, the total size of real files is about 1.5 GB

[Hannah]

Hey @Whitecold, would you mind sending us a screenshot of your space usage, showing the space used by the Dropbox cache, so we can investigate this a bit further?