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Question

Online-Only folder still take up hard-drive space

  • May 22, 2025
  • 1 reply
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I am using MacBook Pro version 10.13.6. I have a Box account associated to my university student account. I am trying to use Box drive to stream files in my university box account to my desktop with an anticipation that the files chosen "online-only" will still show up, but it is just a placeholder since they will not actually take up my hard-drive space. However, the folders that are marked "online-only" still take up my hard drive space, as shown below

BOX__vFoSLj_639ydbkyxbHXh8g.png

As we can see the size is correct, but there is still a 193.6 MB on disk, which is weird, since I didn't mark this folder to be "available offline". Ideally, it should show "0 byte on disk" if the folder does not really take up any hard-drive space. And it also seems like now the box drive is making all of my files taking up hard-drive in my laptop. I am wondering how I can deal with this issue. Is there anyway to fix this?

Just in case, I also check the size of this folder on my terminal and it also shows that it takes up my hard-drive space.

BOX__PzgkHGP81-rFEktwgDED7w.png

Thanks!

    1 reply

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    Hi Kuansen2, 

    Welcome to the Box Community!

    To determine the actual local space that Box Drive takes up in your Mac, you need to examine the properties of Box's cache folder, you can find them in this path:

    • OS X: /Users/<USERNAME>/Library/Application Support/Box/Box/cache

    Also, to learn more about Box Drive's cache information and behavior, this article may be a good source: https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043695894-Technical-Information-for-Box-Drive-Administrators 

    Best,

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