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As explained by Dropbox, Smart Sync is a feature "that helps you save space on your hard drive. Access every file and folder in your Dropbox account from your computer, using virtually no hard drive space. ... With Smart Sync, content on your computer is available as either online-only, local, or in mixed state folders."
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". 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. (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.)
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. I could only restore available space by moving some content back to an external disk.
Confusingly, information about how much space really remained was inconsistent. df showed 58 GB available:
Filesystem 1G-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1 465 403 58 88% /
while About this Mac => Storage showed 232 GB available.
According to one source, "the Storage tab in About This Mac ... 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:
As 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). However: ... macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) uses ... APFS. With APFS, the operating system takes snapshots of the file system and available hard drive space. These snapshots may not update after you've used Smart Sync to set Dropbox files as online only. 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. This hard drive space should eventually be freed up by the OS, but the amount of time this will take can vary. This isn't a behavior specific to Dropbox, but instead the designed behavior of macOS." On APFS, the placeholders for "online-only files use a small amount of space on your hard drive to store information about the file, such as its name and size. This uses less space than the full file." Indeed, files marked as "online-only" continue to show their non-zero (online) sizes (e.g., with ls and os.path.getsize()) as if they were still available locally.
I gather this is a MacOS (i.e., APFS) issue, not specific to Dropbox.
My question: If Disk Utility shows 232 GB "available" but only 62.45 GB "free", what are the consequences? Would bad things happen if I were to add another 100 GB of files to the disk?
I am of course reluctant to add more content than space free just "as an experiment" but see how this could happen unintentionally.
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Uncheck any folders that you'd like to keep in the cloud but don't need access to. This will remove the files from your computer—freeing up space—without having to delete the files. You can change the folders you have on your computer as often as you need.
If you haven't set a file or folder to online-only, then all files and folders in the Dropbox folder on your computer are available offline. This means that they take up space both on your computer's hard drive and in your Dropbox account, but are available even when you're not connected to the Internet.
Dropbox uses several processes to store, sync and update your files. Dropbox also checks for version updates and performs self-monitoring tasks. These tasks can increase CPU usage and may slow down your computer. When you sync a lot of files, especially for the first time, Dropbox may use a lot of CPU.
THIS HELPED ME: https://www.cbackup.com/articles/dropbox-taking-up-space-on-mac-6688.hmtl.html#A1
Solution 4. Clear the Dropbox cache folder Generally, there is a hidden folder that containing Dropbox cache stored in your Dropbox root folder, named ".dropbox.cache". Only when the function of viewing hidden files and folders is enabled in the operating system, you can see the folder.
If you delete a large number of files from Dropbox, but the hard drive of your computer does not reflect these deletions, the deleted files may be saved in the cache folder. So, you can manually clear the cache to clear some space on the hard drive by following the steps below:
Open the Finder and select Go to folder... from the Go menu.
A dialog box should appear. Now copy and paste the following line into the box and press the return key:
~/Dropbox/.dropbox.cache
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