With the sudden unavailability of free drive space on my netbook, I did a little digging to see what could be done to lasso in some pesky space-waters. When I ran WinDirStat I was surprised to see that Dropbox accounted for 24.6GB of hard drive space. This seemed particularly odd, since I only have about 12GB in my whole account.
So this one took a little digging, but I now understand what the heck was going on. I hit
google and found some answers.
As files are accessed and updated, there is a copy of each iteration kept around for 3 days in case you want to roll back. This hadn't been an issue previously, but I recently added an Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) file to my dropbox during a move to my new laptop.
The file is about 1GB on its own...and as I dropped files out there, an additional "old" version of the whole file was kept. At a gig per hit, that's a lot of overhead, if only for 3 days.
Dropbox is smart enough to only push the changed parts of the file...so I didn't notice a bandwidth hit that would come with uploading, say 8GB per day. Instead, I was uploading a couple MB per day. Fortunately, you can delete the files in the dropbox cache without concern (though it'll take longer to roll back to a less-than-three-day-old-file if you find the need to).
On a side note, hooray for only replicating the changed blocks! See former co-workers,
block level storage technology is cool and useful! ;)
So I suppose the take-away is to be mindful of keeping files (large ones in particular) in your Dropbox if they're going to be changing regularly.
Yes, Dropbox is still my top file cloud-sync choice (
has been for years). SkyDrive is making progress, and Google Drive has potential, but Dropbox just plain works.
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