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How do we free up space on the hard drive for two large folders?

Hello Team,

We have a few clients that we need to remove from Dropbox. There are two folders on their Dropbox accounts that I’ve already set to "Online Only" and also unchecked them from Smart Sync.

These folders are quite large and are occupying significant hard drive space. Although we’ve monitored the devices for a few hours after making these changes, the disk space does not appear to be freeing up.

We’d appreciate it if you could advise on the safest way to remove these folders from the users' devices without affecting the actual files in Dropbox.

Looking forward to your guidance.

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Jay

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

Could you confirm the current OS and Dropbox desktop application version running on their devices?

When you say you unchecked them, are you referring to selective sync instead, which removes the folders entirely from the local machine?

Any other info or screenshots would be helpful!

Danudod

Hello jay,

OS version is Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19045.5737]

yes, I unchecked it from the selective sync.

We basically need to remove drop box from the client machine. But nothing seems to be working.

Danudod

And Dropbox is 223.4.4909.0

Nancy

Hey @Danudod, I see you’ve also posted about this here.

However, since you mention that you’re unable to remove the Dropbox app in general from the client’s device, can you clarify what you see exactly? Feel free to send over a screenshot, as well.

Danudod

Hello Nancy, these are two different issues.

Danudod

For this user, we need to remove drop box completely from this workstation only. I unchecked the folders from selective sync but the did not uninstalled the app yet.

So If I uninstall the app, will it remove the files from the local machine?. Or do I need to manually removed any local files after I uninstall the app.

Danudod

Hello Nancy,

This user has a large number of files in her Dropbox, and some of them were available offline. To help free up space, I marked several folders as Online Only.

However, it doesn't appear that this change has released any local disk space automatically. Could you please advise on how we can ensure the files are made available online-only and that the local space is actually freed up?

Looking forward to your guidance.

Jay

In some cases, it's possible that selective sync doesn't automatically delete the local folders that were unchecked. It could be because files in those folders are still being accessed by some files on the machine.

Could you attach a screenshot showing the selective sync settings you mentioned?

If the folders are definitely unchecked, but weren't removed by Dropbox, have you tried deleting those local folders?

Danudod

Hello Jay,
There are some huge files in the Dropbox folders. I haven't tried deleting them locally yet. I just wanted to make sure it won't affect the actual files stored in the Dropbox cloud.

So, if I completely uninstall Dropbox and delete the files locally, it won’t affect the cloud storage, right?

Jay

Yes, if the Dropbox desktop application is completely uninstalled, and then you delete the files in the Dropbox folder, it won't affect the files online.

Are you planning on reinstalling the app again once those files are deleted, or will you be keeping it uninstalled?