Why do my Dropbox files also take up space from my hard drive?

[didi15]

OK I know this probably seems like a dumb question, but bear with me...

I am cleaning up storage on my PC and I see that Dropbox is taking up a huge chunk of memory on my hard drive. But I thought Dropbox was in the cloud. What gives? Is everything I put into Dropbox being saved to two places?

[Mark]

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@didi15 wrote:

OK I know this probably seems like a dumb question, but bear with me...

But I thought Dropbox was in the cloud. What gives? Is everything I put into Dropbox being saved to two places?

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Dropbox syncs most files locally as well - its the whole point of it. So anything on your machine is local (hence it will open without internet) but also syncs to the cloud. It isn't like iCloud where its totally cloud only (note this is slightly different now on newer Mac's). 

To save space you could use online only solutions: https://help.dropbox.com/sync/make-files-online-only

[Nancy]

Thanks for posting your question on our Community, @didi15!

What you mention is true; all of your files are stored in the Dropbox cloud indeed and you should be able to access them on www.dropbox.com. 

However, when you install the desktop app on your computer, a local Dropbox folder is created and it syncs those files locally on your hard drive too for easier access (especially if you’re editing your Dropbox files a lot) and for cases where you don’t have an internet connection and you need to open the files on your computer, like Mark mentioned above. 

Besides making them online-only, you can also remove some folders from the Dropbox app with selective sync (and only access them via your web account). In both cases, that should free up your hard drive space.