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Forum Discussion
Serious problem with Hard Drive space
Hi I have a major problem with disk space, and I just can't seem to find an answer to the problem. I have a little macbook with minimal HD space, hence why dropbox is very handy for me. I...
Rich
Super User II
Super User IIIs there a lot of activity in the shared folder? If so, as files are deleted, Dropbox doesn't actually delete them right away. It stores deletions in the hidden .dropbox.cache folder in the root of your Dropbox folder. Deleted files are typically kept for 3 days before being purged. This is done to aide in recovery in case something was deleted by mistake.
You can delete the content of the folder, but don't delete the folder itself. Also, if you're in the process of syncing and you delete the content, you'll likely have to start that sync process over again as the cache is also used during the sync process.
You can delete the content of the folder, but don't delete the folder itself. Also, if you're in the process of syncing and you delete the content, you'll likely have to start that sync process over again as the cache is also used during the sync process.
Hi Rich
Thanks for your reply.
There is a fair amount of activity on the overall dropbox account. But not in my single chosen selectively synced folder. I estimate that I am running at about a 20% ratio of dropbox activity to hard drive space. I certainly am not deleting files that would quickly fill up 13GB+ of space.
Is it possible that there's some ropey programming that is causing dropbox to allow other people's files to be downloaded to my machine in the background?
- RichHighly unlikely. Have you looked to see where the 13GB of data is actually located? If it's taking up that space on your drive, it has to be somewhere.
I'm not sure how to find out exactly where any other space may be taken. But I found another hidden .dropbox folder within the root of my Home directory (HD > Users) that has a file named "instance 3" and is a further 3GB in size.
Just for testing purposes, I unlinked my account, uninstalled dropbox and regained my 16GB.
I've just reinstalled and finished syncing as before. So far I have the expected amount of HD space free; 13.5GB. At some point over the next few days, I expect to be in the middle of my workflow before my HD space begins depleting rapidly to Zero bytes for now logical reason.
I guess there is no plausible answer for this one. Anyone with hundreds of GBs of space on their computer would probably never even notice it. Unfortunamtely for those of us with very limited (read: ridiculously small!) space it is going to be a continual problem.
On a separate note, I have previously tried to solve this issue by getting myself a nice big TB external hard drive. However, dropbox has terrible support for external hard drives; everytime the mac is shut down, all knowledge of dropbox folder path is lost, meaning that you then have to navigate to the dropox folder on the external hd, and then relink the account, thus having to go through the sync process from scratch each time. I have noted this in the past, and would be good if a dev manager was to pick up on it and improve dropbox's usability by incorporating some form of buffer link between the dropbox folder location and the application's rather eager decision that there is no folder therefore we must resync the entire lot.
Oh well. Ces't La Vie aas they say
- Rich
kaywert wrote:
However, dropbox has terrible support for external hard drives ...
Officially, they have NO support of external drives. Not only are they prone to issues like you experienced, but also loss of data under certain circumstances. The Dropbox client will now let you move the Dropbox folder to an external drive with a warning, but it's still not officially supported. The safest bet when trying to use an external drive with ANY sync solution is to just not do it. Loss of your data isn't worth it.
You might want to look into a disk space analyzer. There are some, like Disk Inventory X (I'm assuming you're on a Mac), that show your files in a graphical list with larger files being represented by larger blocks. It makes it a lot easier to quickly find the larger items on your drive. I use an equivelant application on Windows and they work great.
