If I turn off computer backup in Dropbox can I then delete the My Mac folder from Dropbox?

[douglerner]

This article - How to use computer backup  - shows how to turn off computer backup in Dropbox correctly.

But it doesn't say if we can then delete the My Mac folder from within Dropbox.

I turned the feature on but am feeling unsure about it now. It's still synchronizing apparently. And I got a message from Dropbox saying my disk was running short of space. Sure enough when I checked in the Finder it seems my disk space had dropped from 80 GB to about 16 GB. Currently it's 13.15 GB. Why is the backup process taking up so much space?

Is there a way I can turn it off safely and just get rid of all the extra space it's apparently using and go back to the way it was before I turned it on?

Thanks,

doug

[douglerner]

I decided to turn off computer backup, leaving the synced folders on my computer - not on DropBox. It was just making me too nervous. Some things I've noticed since turning it off:

• My free space is slowly increasing again. It had gone down to 13 GB and is now up to 22.94 GB. I don't get why it went down at all and why it's now increasing.
• The My Mac folder that was created in the Dropbox folder on my Mac is gone now. But it still shows up on my iPhone and iPad. Why is that? The number of files in those folders on the devices is less than on my Mac though.
• The Dropbox app is still syncing syncing syncing. I'm getting continual notices saying things like "119 files added to your Dropbox." Why are files still supposedly still being added to my Dropbox?

All very confusing. I hope it just finishes up and I can forget about the feature.

[douglerner]

This morning space on my computer is still just around 22.3 GB. I'm getting lots of "files deleted" messages now with apparently over 900,000 to go.

And the folders are no longer appearing on my devices.

I'm glad I turned this off. It's way too confusing. 

Plus I saw 100s of sync errors because of "incompatible characters." Everything with a filename in Japanese wouldn't back up! I never have a problem with that in just the regular Dropbox folder.

doug

[douglerner]

Update (maybe some people in a similar situation will find my thread useful)...

The My Mac folder seems to be gone from my iPhone, but is still on my iPad.

It doesn't appear to be in the Dropbox folder on my Mac though. Or on my iPhone.

Oh way - if I leave the folder hierarchy on my iPad and go to the list of all the files in Dropbox the My Mac folder really isn't there.

Quite confusing. I'll wait and see what happens after all the syncing messages go away.

[Lusil]

Hey there @douglerner, thanks for keeping us in the loop - let's see what we can do on this. 

When you enable computer backup, your computer folders will be added to your Dropbox folder, which will take up space on your account. 

However, since you mention that you turned the feature off, could you let me know if you chose to Keep content in folders on this Mac or Leave content in Dropbox?

Give me a nudge when you get the chance to checked this out, thanks!

[douglerner]

Hello. I chose to leave files and folder on my Mac when turning it off.

I absolutely do not recommend trying the new Dropbox "backup your computer" feature. It's very confusing, you start seeing massive drops of free disk space on your computer, support doesn't give any reasonable explanation of why, and it won't sync files with Japanese characters in the filename - plus lots of other files too!

The idea seemed attractive. You would see a "My Mac" folder in Dropbox on all your devices and could access all your files from any device. But it doesn't work well at all.

I did finally unwind and all those "My Mac" folders did eventually disappear from all my devices and I'm back to where I was: backups on Time Machine, a bootable backup with Carbon Copy Cloner, and a cloud backup with BackBlaze. I'm not sure all the space was returned to my Mac disk though.

I do like Dropbox for what it was originally intended for: a folder where you can keep designated files in the cloud. And share them too if you want. I find it useful for that and use it all the time.

And the smart sync feature was a good improvement over their previous "just in the cloud" sync because you can see the files in Dropbox even though they don't take up extra space.

But all their other attempts at new features have just become confusing.