About Rick M.

Ross, Surely a "new snapshot" is taken upon power-off and reboot isn't it? ... View more

Jane, when a remote folder is accessed or a file-in-cloud is accessed, is it brought to the user's disk?  (I was wondering if a user had software that needed files was essentially defeating the smart-sync feature.) ... View more

There is a difference between adding files by syncing (preferred) and adding files via web interface (file size limits). Is there enough space on your hard drive? Do you have any shared-folders with other users?   ... View more

How does Apple calculate space used? Could the OS use metadata from the dropbox placekeeper/shortcut? ... View more

My curiosity is peaked because the "placeholder files" contain both file metadata and thumbnail images of photos or whatever, and it makes me wonder if those "placeholder files" possibly contain Large & Variable amount of space if "large thumbnails" are present. ... View more

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this! But Apple says," APFS introduces snapshots — a new way to create instant snapshots of your entire disk. The snapshots are cheap and fast to create and delete, they don’t consume additional disk space. Time Machine now uses them to create its hourly local snapshots, which are the main contibutor to the purgeable space. In contrast to HFS+, APFS doesn’t delete its snapshots until really necessary. Over time, as you make changes to the data on your disk, the snapshots may pile up until 80% of disk capacity is taken. Snapshots older than 24 hours are deleted automatically. Consequently, About This Mac > Storage may now show the System category taking too much space on macOS High Sierra.   ... View more

You can control snapshot manually.  So turn it off; do smart sync; then request a manual snapshot. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250   ... View more

Ryan, you can "see" all your files all the time if you use the web based access. ... View more