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Is it safe to delete dropbox cache old files?

$ dropbox version
Dropbox daemon version: 99.4.501
Dropbox command-line interface version: 2019.02.14

I'm running Fedora 32 on my main workstation with a 'normal' Dropbox installation, but a fairly small SSD drive. My disk hit 100% today when someone in our team dumped many Gb of data into a shared folder. I used the CLI to `dropbox exclude path/to/huge/files` and they did get removed from my drive (great!) but my disk still appeared full. Investigating, I found 297 files occupying 15Gb in ~/Dropbox/.dropbox.cache/old_files. I don't know if they are related to this problem, their modification times are from 5 days ago. They all have machine-readable names like 16ca69b67850264f29600d17d921b732 but I can tell they're the original files that were in the shared folder.

I don't see any kind of "clean cache" command in the CLI help. Is it safe to delete these files?

Thank you!

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Accepted answers

Jay

Hi @neekfenwick, thanks for joining the Community!

The cache folder is used as a staging area to sync files to and from your account.

The folder should be automatically cleared every few days, however, you can manually empty the cache folder if it’s getting too large.

Let me know how it goes!

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Jay

Hi @neekfenwick, thanks for joining the Community!

The cache folder is used as a staging area to sync files to and from your account.

The folder should be automatically cleared every few days, however, you can manually empty the cache folder if it’s getting too large.

Let me know how it goes!

neekfenwick

Thank you @Jay ! I can be a little patient, I'm interested in when exactly these files will be deleted, so if I can hold on I'll let them clean up by themselves and try to report here how long it took, as it might help others understand what's going on.

Jay

No worries, @neekfenwick, it can be from 3 to 7 days, so if it's longer than that, it might be worth manually deleting them!

neekfenwick

I just checked today and they've gone, though I'm not sure exactly when, at least they did get cleared out automatically which is nice to know. Thanks for the help.

Jay

Glad to hear it, @neekfenwick!

Enjoy your week ahead!

bomberml

Hi, my /.dropbox.cacche./old_files/ directory is 180GB on my laptop. Can I manually delete this entire directory safely, it mainly contains unix files? It has been 5 days since I uploaded anything new to my dropbox and my dropbox says everything is synced. Also some of the files within the /.dropbox.cacche./old_files/ directory are 5 months old, why aren't they deleting automatically?

Thanks for your help,

Monica

Megan

Hey @bomberml, and welcome to our Community!

I've moved you under this thread, since your question seems to echo the one others had.

Dropbox keeps a hidden collection, or cache, of your files as backup storage. Files in the cache folder are stored there often after they are moved or deleted after syncing.

If you can't find your file using all other practical methods, you can try to recover the file from Dropbox cache as a last resort, hence why they remain there.

You should be able to clear your cache, by deleting content without losing any data.

Can you try this, and let me know how it goes?

Thanks!