I have dropbox business, and am trying to create a local archive of a 4 TB dropbox folder. I have my dropbox folder location on my D:\ drive, with a 6 tb drive. My OS drive is a 240 GB SSD. However, as files sync, the reported free space drops down to 0 bytes, causing dropbox to stop syncing, as it thinks space is empty. Restarting puts the SSD free space back to what it actually is. There are no dropbox files on the SSD- it just keeps running out of space until i restart. I assume dropbox is putting temp files somewhere on the OS, and these are being cleared by restarts. Is there a way i can get the OS drive to stop being filled, so that i can download this folder onto the D drive to archive it? I'm having to restart every 15 gb of downloads or so, and that's completely unacceptable.
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That’s odd. Is your Dropbox client up to date? I’m sure newer versions, at least, use hidden folders in the Dropbox folder to save partial downloads. Older ones might have been different. It would be useful if you could identify where on C: it’s creating the files using something like windirstat.– DarrenCommented Aug 2, 2017 at 17:09
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Yep, it's brand new, downloaded the client from dropbox's site 2 days ago. It's on a computer that's never had dropbox downloaded before. I'll try windirstat and see if i can track down where the temp files are being put.– MeesterTeemCommented Aug 2, 2017 at 17:15
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@Darren well, i found a 14 gb hibernation file, and have turned off hibernation. No sense wasting space on that.. Other than some 3 gb windows CBS logs, nothing stands out.– MeesterTeemCommented Aug 2, 2017 at 17:22
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Is this while the disk is filling up though? Maybe process explorer might show what files are in use.– DarrenCommented Aug 2, 2017 at 17:23
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@Darren imgur.com/a/aHuIF Nevermind. I think i found the dropbox temp files being created on the C drive. This screenshot was taken while the dropbox folder is syncing.– MeesterTeemCommented Aug 2, 2017 at 17:25
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1 Answer
Dropbox caches partial downloads and deleted files in hidden directories in the Dropbox folder so that should not cause the C: drive to fill up if the Dropbox folder is on another drive.
However, Dropbox does store some data in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Dropbox including a list of file names (and maybe other meta data) called filecache.dbx. If you have a lot of files in your Dropbox (and you have billions!) this file will grow very large and potentially fill up your C: drive.
One way of avoiding that would be to stop the Dropbox client, move the ...\AppData\Dropbox directory to another drive and create a symlink back to it in the original location using the mklink command.
