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desmond_singh's avatar
desmond_singh
New member | Level 2
5 years ago
Solved

Trying to save files directly on Dropbox (not on hard drive), but they still save on Hard-Disk Drive

Hi All,

 

Let me start by saying I'm brand new to dropbox, so I apologize if my concerns are low-level and I thank you for your patience in advanced.

 

Here are my details:

 

I'm a Bioinformatics student, and I've created a BASH script that:

 

  1. unzips 22 large files (*.vcf.gz to *.vcf)
  2. assigns these unzipped files to a new subfolder within the original directory
  3. concatenates these 22 files into a single, large file

Each unzipped file (*.vcf) is ~ 22 GBs large, so they eat up the space on my hard-disk drive (HDD).

 

Accordingly, I've downloaded the dropbox application on my laptop and moved the project directory within the dropbox application

(ex. '/Users/myprofile/"Dropbox (Personal)"/project_directory').

 

When I run the BASH script that performs the above 3 steps, it doesn't run to completion because the unzipped files are saved to my HDD and it can't store 484+ GB of data. 

 

I'm wondering how I can make it such that when I run the BASH script, the 22 unzipped files and the large, concatenated file are automatically saved onto the dropbox application and NOT my HDD. 

 

I have 2 TB of dropbox space and I'm working on a MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020) running Big Sur v11.4 

 


  • desmond_singh wrote:

    I'm wondering how I can make it such that when I run the BASH script, the 22 unzipped files and the large, concatenated file are automatically saved onto the dropbox application and NOT my HDD.


    You can't. That's not how Dropbox works. It's not a cloud-based folder. It's a regular folder on your local hard drive like any other, and anything stored in the folder takes up space on the drive. Files saved in the folders are synced to your account online. It's not possible to save directly to the cloud, bypassing your local drive.

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