Dropbox cache size limit

Question

I have a problem with the Dropbox cache, so from time to time I find that the specific computer with which I synchronize with Dropbox has run out of disk space, and the Dropbox cache is the culprit. This is a problem because the Dropbox installed on the computer is headless (or almost the same), and therefore the only indication that something is wrong is that the data that should be available on the machine is suddenly missing.

I read that you can clear the cache, but it’s a pain, since OS X is running on this computer and there is no command line interface, which means that I just need to restart Dropbox in the VNC machine. It also limits my ability to automatically clear the cache, although the need to create a periodic task to clear the Dropbox folder seems kludgy and error prone. (For example, a disk may fill before the script runs.)

(Update: Deleting files in a low disk environment seems to cause Dropbox to start syncing again without restarting, but I'm not sure if there are any unwanted side effects wherever I read about the cache says to stop Dropbox during uninstall and restart it afterwards.)

Also, apparently, the reason Dropbox quickly runs out of space is because I have one large log file (about half a gigabyte) that is only added, but Dropbox creates a new cached copy of the entire old version with every change . Thus, in terms of performance, it is undesirable for it to continue to duplicate this large file for each tiny few bytes added to the file.

The disk space is pretty hard on this computer, so I'd rather just limit Dropbox how much caching it does. Is there any way to do this? My searches are still empty.

Update: I tried to open a Dropbox support request, just to get an email reply: “Thank you for writing. Although we would like to answer every question we received, we unfortunately cannot answer your request because of high volume query support. " ಠ_ಠ

Answer 1

I have the same problem with the same reason (it took a while to figure it out): the log file inside the Dropbox folder, which is actually not that big (a few MB), but it is updated every minute with a pair of one hundred bytes. My cache is killing me. My Dropbox shared local folder has 150 GB of which 50 GB is the cache!

I just cleaned it, and I understand that there are no consequences other than resynchronization, but this is unstable.

I see several solutions here:

• Dropbox is not suitable for this use case. Do not store frequently updated magazines in Dropbox. I think this will be a bummer, because for this there should be a fairly simple technical solution, and they:

• Dropbox either has an OR MUST HAVE option for the maximum cache size, as browsers do. It should not be too difficult to implement if it does not exist (apparently), otherwise let us know where it is.

• A script can be written (speaking of Linux here) that periodically (every hour should be enough, but it can be done every minute in theory) checks the disk size .dropbox.cache, and if it exceeds a certain limit, it will delete some files. You can delete the last 10 of them, or 10% of the files, or if you really want to believe, you could calculate how much you should delete from the oldest file in order to maintain a certain cache size. The problem can be stopped by Dropbox, but it seems that if you just pause the synchronization, it should be fine and sufficient.

The numbers 2 and # 3 are really the same thing, it's just a question of who will do it. Given that Dropbox is not an open source platform, it would probably be better if Dropbox would write and support this feature. Any third-party plugin for this can stop working when something inside the Dropbox database changes.

Dropbox has an incentive NOT to provide this feature because frequent syncing = high bandwidth. But I thought we were paying for bandwidth.

Thanks Dropbox, we all love you, especially since you have provided us with all that extra space for free.