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Forum Discussion
Dropbox is taking up all of the space on my harddrive
Dropbox is killing me. I have 2TB of space on my laptop, Dropbox is taking up almost 700gb of it, despite all of my files being set to Online Only. I've also followed the steps suggested by other use...
Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHey rls3800, thanks for your post today!
When you say that you checked the box about the online-only files, do you mean that you enabled the option for new files to sync as online-only?
If so, this wouldn't make your already existing files or the ones you add to that computer online-only, just the new ones added from the website or other devices.
So, if you'd like to switch your files to online-only, select the ones you want (or your entire Dropbox folder), right-click on them and then choose "make online-only".
Let me know how it goes!
Thanks Hannah, I think we're on the right track. What you're telling me is once I checked that box then only new files from that point on went only to the cloud. If that's right, then all the files that went to the cloud previous to my checking that box are both on the cloud and my PC. Therefore I have to indicate on the rest of my data that I only want it backed up to the cloud from now on. If I've got that correctly, in which "entire" Dropbox folder do I select that? Once that's done I'll have more questions about cleaning up the many Dropbox folders on my PC that would appear to have local duplicates of my backup data. It's a mess... just wish Dropbox had a phone connection available for us lowly home users. I need someone to remotely share my system and help me straighten this all out. Anyway, thanks much for the start of what I'm sure will help.
- Hannah
Thanks for your reply, rls3800!
Phone support is currently only available to our Business users, but let's see how we can sort this out from here.
So, indeed, any files that were previously added to your account, and were available offline, wouldn't have been affected by the setting that makes new files online-only.
If you want to make all your Dropbox files online-only, to stop them from taking up space on your hard drive, you'll need to locate the folder named "Dropbox" in your File Explorer, right-click on it and choose "make online-only".
Once you do that, the app will start clearing up your hard drive space, without any additional actions from you.
That means that you don't have to manually delete anything; deleting the files will actually delete them from your account.
You'll just need to let them app do its work and keep an eye on the sync status (the message you see when you hover over the Dropbox icon in your system tray).
Once it shows "up to date", it should have cleared up your hard drive space.
I hope this helps!
Hannah, I think this helps a lot. I found the icon and clicked right then checked the "make online only." I didn't see an symbol or check marks anywhere that indicated it was taking effect, should I? Assuming this works what do I do with the other Dropbox folders I seemed to have accumulated, through my own ignorance over the years, can those be deleted? Thanks again.
