Dropbox contains a hidden cache folder which stores deleted files. When you attempt to recover a deleted file this folder is used to restore your files instead of downloading them from the Dropbox server. This might be useful for a lot of people since it saves time and bandwidth to restore files from your local hard drive. However, this might be a problem for people who always find themselves short of hard disk space. In this post I will tell you how to locate and empty your Dropbox cache folder to reclaim vaulable disk space in Windows, Linux and Mac.
The cache folder can be accessed from the below paths:
Windows:
PathToYourDropboxFolder\.dropbox.cache\ (or)
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox\cache
Linux:
~/Dropbox/.dropbox.cache or PathToYourDropboxFolder/.dropbox.cache/
Mac
Go to Dropbox then using Finder’s Find option click the drop-down box and select “Other…”, after that, check “File invisible” to display invisible items.
Note: You will require displaying hidden files and folders from the Folder Options in Windows and hitting Ctrl+H in Linux, as the Dropbox cache folder is a hidden folder. To make it short, just go to the Dropbox folder and display hidden files to locate the dropbox,cache folder (as shown in the below screenshot).
Clearing the cache folder is simple, just exit Dropbox and delete the files and folders within the .dropbox.cache folder. Make sure you do not delete the cache folder itself and do not delete the .db files. Once you have emptied this folder, your deleted files will no longer sync with linked systems and therefore, will not take up your disk space.
The below screenshot is an example of the amount of files which were present in my Dropbox cache folder before I deleted them.
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