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.Trash folder in the Dropbox folder makes it difficult to reclaim space

After deleting tens of GB of data and having NO additional space freed up on my machine, I eventually discovered the hidden folder ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/.Trash was hoarding these deleted files.

I found an old post on here that claimed this was due to a bug that was fixed in an old version of MacOS 13, but I'm on 14.6.1 and it's still happening.

I'm a photographer and my first step is to add my files to Dropbox, then go through and cull them. So I regularly delete tons of data and need to do that in order to be able to continue using my machine, it will quickly fill up.

Can I disable this behavior, or is there an easy way to purge the folder?

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Jay

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

Did you enable the Dropbox Backup feature at one point?

Are you able to manually move that folder out of the Dropbox folder?

This will help me to assist further!

radical_exponent

Hi @wanderr, is it possible that you had installed Dropbox on that machine (and signed in) while you were on macos 13? If so, that could explain this - as the .Trash folder will (unfortunately) stick around if it was ever created due to that bug. It's possible that simply signing out, deleting the .Trash folder, and then signing back in would fix this. If not, it may be necessary to ensure your content is synced, sign out, navigate to the Dropbox folder and following the "Delete Dropbox..." prompts, and then signing back in.

If on the other hand, this bug occurred in a situation where you've only ever had macos 14+, that sounds like potentially a previously-unknown bug.