While poking around and looking for space I happened to notice the following:
I have a “Dropbox cache” folder using 2 GB! What makes this interesting to me is that I am using just under 900 MB on Dropbox.
I’d theorize that this is used to help offline and versioning scenarios(?) but shouldn’t it cleaned up at some point?
Other Dropbox users, could you check to see if you have similarly sized cache directories on your system?
Updated: Per a forum post, it looks like maybe I can just delete what’s in there… So, knowing that…
Other Dropbox users, check your caches!
Side Note: I only noticed this because I was goofing around with DriveSpaceio which I had just read about over at Tightwad Technica. Pretty slick and worth a look.
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12 comments
John Cummings says:
October 10, 2008 at 6:53 pm (UTC -7 )
I was reading your post, and thought I’d explain why the cache is so large based on personal experience. I had an issue with Dropbox, where one of the attached clients deleted files that it shouldn’t have (detailed here http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?id=3794&replies=23). The cache is there so that when a file is deleted by another client, there is a “copy in reserve” in case something goes horribly wrong (as it did in my case). When/if it does, the proper state of your drop box can be restored server side.
I was “very” happy that the cache was there, and was more than willing to give up the 2GB + of disk space in order to retrieve my files.
Just thought you’d want to know.
Chris says:
October 11, 2008 at 3:50 pm (UTC -7 )
Excellent point, John. Thanks for sharing that!
Bryan says:
November 19, 2008 at 8:53 pm (UTC -7 )
My dropbox cache was OVER 12 GB. Deleted!
Chris says:
November 20, 2008 at 11:27 am (UTC -7 )
12 GB!! Wow.
And hey, for anyone running DropBox with Linux, your cache is under your ~you/.dropbox/cache
J says:
January 30, 2009 at 9:53 am (UTC -7 )
i use dropbox on my mac and had 18.9 gb of cache!!!
i deleted it
James says:
March 10, 2009 at 8:29 am (UTC -7 )
25.5 gig.
OUCH!
DELETED!
Ken says:
July 16, 2009 at 7:36 pm (UTC -7 )
I’m the current record holder at 32.3 gigs. Deleting now, with fingers crossed.
Chris says:
July 16, 2009 at 10:11 pm (UTC -7 )
You’ll be glad to hear that Dropbox is changing to a 30 day retention on changes… hopefully that’ll avoid such huge caches in the future!
mkid says:
December 7, 2009 at 9:38 pm (UTC -7 )
70Gigs. Wife’s computer been acting up so have been removing the dropbox, relocating to new computers, new drives on the same computer, etc, etc.
http://img.skitch.com/20091208-j212tk8ni7mdncr5xixamtehrc.jpg
Still… 70 gigs…
Chris says:
January 7, 2010 at 3:48 pm (UTC -7 )
Ran into this problem this morning. My cache was reasonably large (~9 GB), but that’s fine with me. The main problem was that, by default, the cache is put on the C:, which in my case was a small partition just designed to hold the OS and any really essential programs. For anyone having this problem, there are two work-arounds (sorry, both only for Windows…you’re on your own in Linux/Mac):
http://wiki.dropbox.com/DropboxAddons/DropboxDataWrapper
http://www.torgorama.com/2009/11/09/you-learn-something-new-every-day/
I used the second (and it was really easy) because it didn’t require changing anything native to Dropbox.
Wil says:
September 6, 2010 at 5:28 pm (UTC -7 )
86 GB dropbox cache!! i just deleted it. only discovered it because of low disk space warning.
brett says:
May 2, 2011 at 4:12 pm (UTC -7 )
thanx all for the info..i had 111 Gig on Cache! obvilously I was moving large files, but still, that’s crazy.