Dropbox is using my hard drive space, despite using online-only for my local content.

Disregard, it took it several minutes to move it to the on-line only.  Kind of shady thing Dropbox is doing.  Why are we paying for on-line storage when you all are setting it up to save on the customer's hard drive???  Lost some respect with me on this one...

jjbb72 wrote:

Dropbox is using 111GB of my hard drive space. I was in the understanding that this was a "cloud" type service.

You've misunderstood how Dropbox works.

The Dropbox folder on your computer is a regular folder like any other. Anything in the folder takes up space on your local drive. The "cloud" part of it occurs when Dropbox syncs your data to your account online, and then on to any other devices you have linked. The cloud is used to store a copy of your data that is automatically updated with any changes that you make.

There are ways to save disk space. As you mentioned, setting files or folders to online-only will remove the content from your local drive and leave a marker file in its place. This allows you to continue to see what content you have in your account without taking up space. If any online-only files are accessed, Dropbox will download them back to your local drive automatically and mark them as Available.

There is also Selective Sync, which allows you to remove entire folders from your drive completely, so they only exist in your account online. In this case, they would no longer be visible on your local drive.

jjbb72 wrote:

I recently hit the on-line only setting, but no space cleared on my hard-drive.

When you set files or folders as as online-only or use Selective Sync to remove a folder, you will reclaim that local disk space but it will take some time. Dropbox typically caches data for three days to aid in recovery should it be needed. You can clear the cache folder manually, but it's best to just let Dropbox handle it. If you clear the cache while files are syncing, the process would need to start over again.