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Forum Discussion
old_files cache folder occupying too much space on Ubuntu
My hard disk space is running low regularly because the old_files folder in the dropbox cache takes too much space (40+ GB). I have to manually delete this folder every couple of days now. Is there a way to limit its size or to have it deleted automatically?
I am using dropbox on an ubuntu system.
Can Dropbox please revisit cache settings. There are several programs which write temporary files that can clutter the cache. I've ran into this a couple times, and so have other users that I have seen on the forums. I've had my cache blow up to hundreds of gigs -- which otherwise fills up the hard disk space. Honestly, I just want to turn the cache off, but even just having a setting to throttle it would be really beneficial. It can take up absorbent amounts of space.
I previously wrote a post about generally throttling the entire cache. I understand the cache is used by Dropbox through several of its routines, which may make this difficult. However, is it possible to just turn off the "old_files" folder? I routinely run programs through my Dropbox setup across multiple devices. Part of this process writes temporary files, which even when I turn off sync to the folders that are being written to, will be added to the old_files cache when the temporary files are deleted. The amount of processing is large enough to fill up the folder with 100s of GB that will then eventually take up the entire capacity of the hard drive. To my understanding, "old_files" is essentially a recycle bin used to just back up files in case I need to recover something that I accidently deleted -- which I would assume is not used by Dropbox in other essential routines. This seems like an optional feature to me. I want to just disable it, because it is adding detrimental behavior to my environment.
A quick fix is to routinely delete the "old_files" folder. There are two problems with this: (1) it can be annoying to do manually, when you run things as often as I do; and (2) if I do it programmatically, it can run into issues when trying to delete that folder while the recently deleted files are being written to it by Dropbox.thanks for any feed back on if this option is already available, Dropbox plans on adding this feature (seems simple enough in theory), or someone has another workaround!
- Rich
Super User II
There's no way to limit its size, and items in the .dropbox.cache folder are automatically removed after three days. There are no settings to control this.
Thanks. I should have explained that they aren't removed automatically in my case.
Hi wimdeceuk,
Yes, cache files may stay much longer unfortunately - one more imperfection (not to say something else). An easy workaround might be a cron job that wipe out the cache let say once a day (or some other period, convenient for you). 😉
Good luck.
