Solo Technology

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.

4 Responses to “Large Dropbox Cache?”

1. John Cummings on October 10th, 2008 6:53 pm
   

   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.

2. Chris on October 11th, 2008 3:50 pm
   

   Excellent point, John. Thanks for sharing that!

3. Bryan on November 19th, 2008 8:53 pm
   

   My dropbox cache was OVER 12 GB. Deleted!

4. Chris on November 20th, 2008 11:27 am
   

   12 GB!! Wow.

   And hey, for anyone running DropBox with Linux, your cache is under your ~you/.dropbox/cache

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