This hard drive space should eventually be freed up by the OS, but the amount of time this will take can vary. This means that hard drive space you freed up with Smart Sync may not be immediately reflected or available if this snapshot hasn't updated. These snapshots may not update after you've used Smart Sync to set Dropbox files as online only. With APFS, the operating system takes snapshots of the file system and available hard drive space. Capacity 500.07 GB, Available: 232 GB (169.55 GB purgeable), Used: 433 GBĪs explained by Dropbox, 'setting files to be online only will free up space on your hard drive within minutes (as long as your computer is online and able to sync to Dropbox).433.68 GB used, 3.95 GB on other volumes, 62.45 GB free.

can be useful as it is the only guide to what types of data are taking up storage space, but when you want to know how much space is used or free on any volume or disk, use Disk Utility: it’s much more likely to be accurate.' Confusingly, however, my Disk Utility displayed both results: While About this Mac => Storage showed 232 GB available.Īccording to one source, 'the Storage tab in About This Mac. df showed 58 GB available: Filesystem 1G-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on I could only restore available space by moving some content back to an external disk.Ĭonfusingly, information about how much space really remained was inconsistent. With growing alarm, I watched as each new directory added to Dropbox ratcheted up the amount of space used on the MacBook to dangerous levels (93%) even as large directories marked as 'online only' continued to sync to the Dropbox cloud. (More than twenty hours later, two larger folders still show the blue icon, for 'synching', even though their contents have long appeared on the other computer.)

The files rather quickly synched with Dropbox on the cloud - I saw them appear in the local folders of a desktop computer that shares the dropbox - but the grey icons (for 'online only') took a long time to display in Finder.

Last night and this morning, I moved a large quantity of files from an external disk into Dropbox folders on my MacBook (MacOS Mojave Version 10.14.4), then selected those Dropbox folders to be 'online-only'. With Smart Sync, content on your computer is available as either online-only, local, or in mixed state folders.' Access every file and folder in your Dropbox account from your computer, using virtually no hard drive space. As explained by Dropbox, Smart Sync is a feature 'that helps you save space on your hard drive.

Dropbox on mac taking up space