Child Item

Dropbox fills up my hard drive on Mac OS

Dropbox Plan

Business
Device

Mac Studio
Operating System/Browser (if using the web)

macOS14.8.1
Dropbox App Version (if using the app)

v236.4.5918

Question or Issue

I have 500GBs of footage I need to upload to my team's dropbox account. When I try to copy the footage from an external hard drive, my local drive on my Mac fills up. I have my sync set to ONLINE-ONLY so I'm not understanding why it's filling up my local drive so I essentially can't transfer to the footage due to running out of storage space. What's the approach here?

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Comments

Jay

Hi @tholmes33, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you try marking the Dropbox folder as online-only by right clicking it and choosing that option?

This should free up the space taken up on your computer.

Keep me updated with any progress!

tholmes33

I marked it as online-only and after a bit of time it reduced the space on my local HD. But this was after uploading. However, I have over 2TBs of footage I need to upload on my team's dropbox account. How do I upload that without it taking up space on my main HD since I have no where near 2TBs of space laying around on my local drive? What workflow do you suggest?

Hannah

Hi from me as well, @tholmes33.

The best way to go about this would be to separate the files in batches, upload one batch, make it online-only and then continue with the next one.

It might not be ideal, but for the files to actually sync to the account, they initially need to be in their original form and take up hard drive space.

I hope this helps.

Rich

tholmes33 wrote:
However, I have over 2TBs of footage I need to upload on my team's dropbox account. How do I upload that without it taking up space on my main HD ...

In short, you can't, at least not all at once. If your intent is to copy all 2TB into the Dropbox folder so it can sync to your team, then you need 2TB of space available on your local drive. The Dropbox folder is just a regular folder like any other. It's not a cloud-only folder where data you copy to it never touches your local drive. Anything in the folder takes up local disk space unless you mark it as Online-only, but you can only do that after the data has been copied to the folder and synced with Dropbox.

A way around that would be to add data in batches, up to as much as your drive will hold, and mark it as Online-only after the sync has completed. Doing so would remove that batch of data from your local drive, making room for the next batch.

Start by creating a folder in your Dropbox. Move a portion of the footage into that folder and wait for it to sync to your account online. Once the sync is done, right-click the folder and mark it as Online-only. Again, wait for the sync to finish as it removes those files from your local drive. Once complete, move the next portion of the footage into the folder and repeat the process.

An alternative to this would be to create a folder in your Dropbox and use Selective Sync to completely remove it from your local drive. This leaves the folder in your account online, but not on your computer. Then use the Dropbox website to manually upload files directly into that folder. This is a much slower process and prone to failure with large amounts of data, and with no option to resume if there's a problem.

And if you want a third-party solution, again start by creating a folder and removing is using Selective Sync. Then use something like Cyberduck or Mountain Duck to upload files directly into the folder online.

tholmes33

Thanks for the reply. Understood on the upload process.

If you don't mind answering, is this the same on the other end? For example, once I upload the 2TB to Dropbox, when my team needs to access the footage to start editing, they'd have to mark the folder "make available offline" (which would fill up local drive) and then copy over to an external to then work on. Then they'd have to change the dropbox folder to back to online-only to free up the local drive again. Do I have that right?

Jay

If the team needs to download or access the files, they would need to mark the folder as available offline, which would then download the files to their local Dropbox folder.

They can then copy the files to the external drive, if their Dropbox folder isn't already located on the external drive, in order to edit the files.

Once done, they can copy the edited files into the Dropbox folder for them to sync back to the site, and then mark the files as online-only.

Rich

tholmes33 wrote:
... when my team needs to access the footage to start editing, they'd have to mark the folder "make available offline" (which would fill up local drive) ...

They don't have to mark the entire folder as Available Offline. They could do that for individual files so the entire folder doesn't download. They could also just open the files as is. The nice thing about files marked as Online-only is that they still appear in the local Dropbox folder without taking up space, and they can be opened like any other file. When done so, Dropbox will automatically download the file and it will be opened as usual.

Point is, they don't have to fill up their local drive to access the folder. That only happens for you because the files need to be in your local Dropbox folder before Dropbox can upload them.