Dropbox Filling Up Your Hard Drive?

dropbox-cache-cleaner
I’ve been testing out Dropbox as a way to sync my 1Password files between computers (which works really well) and, more experimentally, to share a single iTunes Library (which… doesn’t work so well).

A few days after installing it, I started getting “Your Startup Disk Is Almost Full” messages.  Having had a similar experience with a client who was backing up to Apple’s .MAC service, I quickly zeroed in on Dropbox as the culprit.  A quick bit of Google-Fu found other people having the same issue — and it also found a solution.

Dropbox creates a hidden folder in your home directory named “.dropbox” where it keeps a database of your account configuration and information about what should be synchronized to your local Dropbox folder.  Inside this folder is a “cache directory” which seems to accumulate a *TREMENDOUS* amount of data (mine was almost 10GB!).  The program currently doesn’t allow you to manage the size of the cache, so I had to manually clear it out to free up my hard drive space.

Since then, some enterprising Dropbox user has written a Dashboard widget to monitor the size of the cache and allow you to clear it out with the push of a button.

Download it here:

Dropbox Cache Cleaning Widget

One Response to “Dropbox Filling Up Your Hard Drive?”

  1. Taro May 25, 2011 at 10:26 am #

    Thanks man!
    Didn’t know there was a hidden cache file!

    Even thou I had set my hidden files to be visible, it seems like there was another option, which hides system protected files. Uncheck that option and the cache folder shall be visible!

    PS: this is for the PC users