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Selective Sync not freeing up space on Mac

When I use selective sync to make some files/folders offline, they delete from my Finder, but the available space does not change. My MacBook Pro internal hard drive is out of space, no matter how much I change to offline.

Interestingly I do not see the cloud/offline little icons next to Dropbox folders in Finder.
When I Control click on a folder/file I can choose to make it online only, and again it will change to online and that file size will turn to ZERO but the actual space in my HD will not free up.

I have an unlimited business account with over 32TB of storage online. I've been using DB for many years and have not run into this issue.

I've been on tech help with DB but w/o any luck after trying these solutions.

Quit/restart DB.

Sign out and re-sign in to Dropbox (which requires reindexing all the files which takes hours).

Quit other cloud apps (Google Drive and Sharepoint)

Multiple restarts

Disk utility first aid on all HD partitions.

My Mac OS: 14.4.1

Is it possible it's an issue with the recent change with Macs and I need to move the DB folder to the Library?

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Accepted answers

JohnnyDogman

Sorry to hear about the trouble with Selective Sync. Here are some additional steps to try:

Move Dropbox Folder:
- Try moving the Dropbox folder to a different location, such as the Library folder. Go to Dropbox Preferences > Sync > Move.
Reindex Spotlight:
- Reindex Spotlight to ensure your Mac is recognizing the freed-up space. Go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, add your hard drive, then remove it to trigger reindexing.
Clear Dropbox Cache:
- Delete the contents of ~/Dropbox/.dropbox.cache to clear temporary files that might be taking up space.
Check Storage Usage:
- Use a disk space analyzer tool (like DaisyDisk) to see what's consuming space on your hard drive.

If these steps don’t resolve the issue, it might be worth reaching out to Apple for further assistance, as it could be a macOS-related issue.

All comments

Mark

Dropbox has a hidden cache that stores all files which are used, or, turned to selective sync etc. for a few days. That means that while they appear deleted and not visible etc. they are still on the Mac for a few days in case you need to recover them. For example if you unsync a folder before its all uploaded it just deletes everything even things not sync'd. This is a way to stop it doing that and hopefully let people recover them.

If you are sure it can be emptied have a look at https://help.dropbox.com/delete-restore/cache-folder and delete everything in it 🙂

GABRIEL D.2

Interesting. I did not know about that folder and function. Unfortunately that did not fix the issue. I've un-synced over 300GB and that folder only had about 7GB. So there must be some other issue. Thank you.

JohnnyDogman

Sorry to hear about the trouble with Selective Sync. Here are some additional steps to try:

Move Dropbox Folder:
- Try moving the Dropbox folder to a different location, such as the Library folder. Go to Dropbox Preferences > Sync > Move.
Reindex Spotlight:
- Reindex Spotlight to ensure your Mac is recognizing the freed-up space. Go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, add your hard drive, then remove it to trigger reindexing.
Clear Dropbox Cache:
- Delete the contents of ~/Dropbox/.dropbox.cache to clear temporary files that might be taking up space.
Check Storage Usage:
- Use a disk space analyzer tool (like DaisyDisk) to see what's consuming space on your hard drive.

If these steps don’t resolve the issue, it might be worth reaching out to Apple for further assistance, as it could be a macOS-related issue.