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Hidden .dropbox_bi folder storing 87GB of files locally!

Hi, I've just recently set up a new Dropbox Professional account. After installing the desktop app on my Mac I also set up a backup of my external SSD, which completed successfully yesterday.

Standard Dropbox file sync seems to be working fine, and the Dropbox app says everything is up to date, but for some reason I now have a new hidden folder under my Mac user folder called .dropbox_bi. That folder is storing 87GB of files on my primary SSD, apparently related to the 220GB of data backed up from the external SSD.

Is this my life now? Or is there some way to recover that massive waste of precious primary SSD storage space?

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Dropbox Backup

Accepted answers

Jay

Hi @bea1356, if you're still being affected by this, please try the following steps:

Navigate to https://dropbox.com/backup/all. You should see a page listing all of your active backups.
Any affected external drive backups will have an adjacent icon indicating that there are restored files.
Turn off automatic backup for each of these backups from the backup management UI:
1. Open the Dropbox tray on your computer.
2. Under “Sync and backups”, click on the affected backup. You should now see a page for managing the backup.
3. Scroll down to the “Adjust settings” section.
4. Find the “Automatically back up drive” slider.
5. Turn the slider to off. This will pause automatic backup.
6. Repeat for each affected backup.
You should see free space on your computer start to go up.
Wait until free space on your computer has stabilized. This may take 30 minutes or more.
Turn on automatic backup for the affected external drive backups from the backup management UI.
1. Open the Dropbox tray on your computer.
2. Under “Sync and backups”, click on the affected backup. You should now see a page for managing the backup.
3. Scroll down to the “Adjust settings” section.
4. Find the “Automatically back up drive” slider.
5. Turn the slider to on to resume automatic backup.
6. Repeat for each affected backup.
Return to https://dropbox.com/backup/all
In the affected backups, you will find a folder containing any restored files. Verify that your backup already contains the files in this folder, then go ahead and delete it.

Keep me posted with any updates!

All comments

Chatterbox

I just had the same problem also. I have been using the drive Backup feature to upload the contents of several external drives holding mostly archived content and measuring several terraBytes in total over several drives. I use Dropbox for my business and am allotted 10TB in total storage space. My team folder in comparison is "only" a couple hundred gigs.

My new travel laptop has a 1 terraByte SSD and I just noticed the drive was full and no longer syncing to Dropbox. I viewed my file storage and it could only identify about 300 gigs in ALL files. I shifted everything in my Team Folder to online only and then started deleting everything I could, but it made no difference. Something was eating up ever more drive space even as I was deleting or offloading files by selective sync.

So I then toggled hidden files on and found a dropbox.bi file with over 800 gigabytes in it . It is a container file and within it were folders named for every backup disk I had created. I HAD NO INTENTION OF MY NUMEROUS DRIVE BACKUPS BEING MIRRORED ON ANY COMPUTER, LET ALONE MY LAPTOP! Whoever wrote the code that introduced these files onto my laptop needs a head check. It makes zero sense to mirror my uploaded archive data back down to a computer connected to Dropbox, and this caused me immense trouble for over a week before I identified the problem.

I simply deleted the files in a hidden subfolder inside dropbox.bi called DropboxBackup, and this caused Dropbox to stop sync'ing, despite no LOTS of free disk space, and display warnings at me. Multiple restarts solved the sync problem and now I find myself watching that dropbox.bi for changes in size. I feel like it's a cancer in my computer! Why is it even there?

Walter

Hey @Chatterbox - thanks flagging this with us.

Just to make sure we're not eh same page, could you send us a screenshot of how this file looks on your end and clarify your computer's OS version and the version and status of the Dropbox desktop as shown in your menu bar?

Apart from that, can you let us know if you're currently using or used the Dropbox Backup feature in the past perhaps?

Any additional information is more than welcome!