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Local storage decreasing when I set folders to online-only

I need to free up space on my iMac's local drive. I set one folder on my Dropbox drive to online-only and instead of freeing up space, I'm watching it slowly eat up the local drive. The folder I set to online-only had just 42mb worth of files on it but my local drive space has now decreased by almost 1gb and continues to decrease even though all the sub-folders and files of the online-only folder have the cloud icon next to them now.

I am on a Mac running MacOS 13.5.2 and Dropbox version 186.4.6207.

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Jay

Hi @oduibhir, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you try clearing the cache folder to see if this helps?

Keep me updated with any progress!

oduibhir

Thank you for responding Jay. I dragged the sub-folders in the cache folder to the trash (but did not empty the trash). The available space on my local drive continues to go down at a pretty rapid pace. I'm down about 2.5 gb now.

John

Jay

Are you certain that the Dropbox desktop application is causing this? If you right click the Dropbox folder and choose 'Get info', how large is the folder?

A screenshot of this, while hiding the username itself, would be great!

oduibhir

Hi Jay,

I mean, since I can't see what files are being written to the drive, no, I can't know for sure that the problem is Dropbox. The available storage was steady before I changed the status of the one sub-Dropbox folder and then it started going down. I did notice that it's size has not been changing so you may be right about it not being Dropbox causing the available size to continue to drop. I'll try changing a larger Dropbox folder to online-only and see if the available storage drops.

Here is a screenshot of the Get Info for the Dropbox root folder.

Jay

The size and size on disk are the same, which means that nothing has become online-only yet (the size on disk should be smaller).

Could you check to see if online-only files on Mac is enabled on this page?

oduibhir

Hi Jay,

Thanks for sticking with me on this.... My settings had online-only files on Mac set to Off. I switched it to On and then logged off the user and logged back in again to restart Dropbox. Interestingly. while on my other user on the same computer, I noticed that the hard drive space stopped going down when the user with Dropbox was logged off.

I logged back on to the Dropbox user and noticed that the icons saying the folders were online-only were gone. I watched my disk space for a little bit and noticed that it wasn't changing anymore, so I set the same folder to online-only again. Immediately, the available disk space dropped instead of going up. I checked the individual files in that online-only folder and they say they take up zero bytes. However, the folder that they live in still says it is taking up the same amount of space as before I set it to online-only. My hard drive is now down to 115 gb from nearly 200 gb when I first set Dropbox to online-only. The available space continues to drop, albeit more slowly than it was last week.

Walter

Hey @oduibhir - sorry to jump in here, but, since you made some changes to the status of the files/folders, have you tried clearing the cache since you noticed this space discrepancy?

oduibhir

Hi Walter,

Good idea. I did try that. There was only about 52mb in the cache but I put it in the trash and emptied the trash. The change in my available hard drive space was minimal and is still dropping.

Dropbox is now giving me messages that I'm about to run out of hard drive space. I'm loath to change any other Dropbox folders to online-only for fear that that will completely wipe out the remaining space. I have one folder on Dropbox that I haven't changed to online-only that has >43 gb in it. Would love to reclaim that space but...

Hannah

Hi from me as well, @oduibhir.

Can you try removing some large folders completely with selective sync, to see if that frees up their space?

You can add them back later; folders you unsync through selective sync and then choose to sync them again, will download as online-only, so if you add them back, they shouldn't take up space.

oduibhir

Hi Hannah and thanks for the suggestion.

I made the change you suggested about 75 minutes ago, unchecking two folders in selective sync. Together, those two folders had about 34 gb in them. The available space initially dropped a little but then started going in the right direction. At the peak, I got about 4 gb of space back. However, since then, it's been going back down again and I'm now less than 1 gb ahead of where I was when I set those two folders to selective sync. I never got anywhere close to the 34 gb back. Those folders have disappeared from Finder on my Mac.

Jay

Since you've enabled the online-only option on the site, could you now try marking folders as local, and then as online-only to see if this helps?

A screenshot showing the folders as they appear in Finder (while hiding any personal names and info) would also help to determine if they're online-only.

oduibhir

Hi Jay,

Here are a couple screenshots of folders that are online-only. The numbers look pretty good. The one that is taking up 3 mb on my local drive, takes up 31.7 gb on Dropbox. The one that takes up 26.7 mb takes up 5.6 gb on Dropbox. It' frustrating because the changes I've made to Dropbox should have freed up 31.7 gb + 5.6 gb + 33.3 gb but my computer actually is showing less free space now than it did when I started this process.Is 5.6 gb on DropboxIs 31.7 gb on Dropbox

Jay

Since it looks like Dropbox is freeing up space as you mentioned, this issue might related to some other app or service on your machine.

If you quit the Dropbox desktop application entirely, does the free space continue to decrease?

oduibhir

Hi Jay,

Sorry if this is a lot of information... I run two users on my computer almost all the time - one is a work user and one is a personal user. The personal user doesn't have Dropbox. When both users are running I can see the available disk space dropping no matter which user I'm working in. If I logout of the work user so that Dropbox is no longer running, the disk space stops dropping. I realize that isn't conclusive but it does demonstrate that if Dropbox isn't running, the available disk space stops dropping.

I'm now becoming very concerned about what is going on with Dropbox. I spent the entire morning working on a document that is in a folder on Dropbox. I saved the file multiple times during the morning and never received an error message. The indiction in Microsoft Word that a file is either saved or unsaved, always changed to the saved state. However, at lunch, Microsoft had an update to Word to install so I quit Word. When I came back and opened the file using Recent Files, none of the changes I made was still there.

John

oduibhir

Hi Jay,

I have an update on the space... in the last half hour, all the sudden the available drive space jumped up from 116 gb to 192 gb! That's about how much space I thought I had freed up. I'm not sure why it would take so long to update. Now if I could only get all those changes back that I made this morning 🙂

John

Jay

Thanks for the update, it seems that it might have taken a little longer to free up the space on the machine for some reason.

Regarding the Word document, are you certain it was in the Dropbox folder itself? Do you see the file on the Dropbox site, and on the events page?

oduibhir

Hi Jay,

If I look at Dropbox on the web, the file was there. When I saw that the file didn't update, that was the first place I looked. I agree that it sounds like it wasn't the same file but I don't keep the files any other place.

It is saving now. What happens if a file is open, then I change the status of its folder to online-only while the file is still open? Would that cause it not to save?

John

Jay

It wouldn't be possible to mark files as online-only while you're on the file itself, since the file is already local during the editing process.

One small possibility is that Word was somehow finding the file in the Dropbox cache folder, which is only a temporary storage, and the file was then deleted during the clearing of the cache.