Safe to empty cache?

Postscript: I'm on a Macbook pro, in case that's not obvious from the directory names...

Hi Paula, 

Welcome to the Box Community!

It looks like the folder you are looking at /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Box/Box/cache is the Box Drive cache folder and not for Box Edit.

Box Drive and Box edit are different applications, and we do not recommend that you manually delete those cache data in the Box Drive folder.

If you want to save spaces, you may logout from the Box Drive app. Logging out completely removes all traces of your Drive usage from your machine and enables you to log in again as a new user. Also, when you log out, your Box Drive session ends and the login screen displays. In addition, logging out of Box Drive deletes all of the downloaded content you had marked for offline availability. This of course clears up hard disk space on your device. It also returns to an online-only state all of the content you have marked for offline availability. You will have to repeat the process of marking folders for offline availability.

More information can be found in this article: https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043697494-Using-Box-Drive-Basics#h_795b7dd8-2ffc-408e-844d-52c0b757bbf5 

That's not an acceptable answer.

I've marked 5GB of files for offline use. My available HD space has dropped by over 200GB almost overnight.

Your solution, despite being inconvenient, means having to go through my files and re-mark and re-download those files again.

A much more practical solution is setting up a chron task to purge that cache folder every few hours.

However, all of the files marked for offline use are also in that folder! So they must be re-downloaded again anyway.

A more elegant solution would be having files marked for offline use in another directory, so caches can be freely purged.

For contrast, my Downloads folder, with files I've downloaded from close to a decade ago, is managed, by me. I delete files when I'm done with them. It's currently taking 50GB. (Did I mention that's been collected for almost a decade?) In just this week of viewing, previewing, marking for offline use, then marking for online only, I've used up 200GB of "cache" that I cannot purge easily.

Does logging out of or restarting the desktop computer allow the cache to be purged? How "temporary" are these cache files? How long does Box Drive hold onto them for? A few days? Until space runs out? Is there a way to set a manual limit on the size of the cache?

Hi David, 

Welcome to the Box Community!

At present, there is no way to change the cache location of Box Drive however, this idea has been shared to our Product Team and is currently under consideration.

For information about Box Drive's cache, Box Drive's cache size limit is set to 50% of your available local disk space with a maximum limit of 25GB and a minimum of 1GB. For the maximum cache duration limit it is set for 30 days by default.

You can find all this information in this article: Technical Information for Box Drive Administrators 

The article also discuss of how you can adjust your Box Drive cache limits which could also help save spaces from your device.

Thanks for sharing your insight with us and for your participation in the forum, we really appreciate it!

Regards, 

Regarding the statement from 362976492687 above:

For information about Box Drive's cache, Box Drive's cache size limit is set to 50% of your available local disk space with a maximum limit of 25GB and a minimum of 1GB. For the maximum cache duration limit it is set for 30 days by default.

My current box cache is 47,39GB right now. It is basically out of control and certainly well beyond the 25GB limit stated above. Not only do I have almost 50GB in this folder, I also seem to have 47,34GB allocated to /Users/<username>/Library/CloudStorage, with the only subfolder (and cloud storage solution i use) being Box.
So that is basically almost 100GB of cache usage?

I would highly appreciate an option to purge/clear the cache as this is currently blocking me from patching my MacOS because I don't have enough free storage.

Hans, what we're seeing is when you mark a folder for offline use, it downloads the files to your HD *&* caches them in your cache folder.

Under normal use, downloading files ad-hoc as you use them from Box Drive, I can see where the cache might not grow beyond the limits they've set.

But if you mark a folder larger than that for offline use, it downloads it, and it occupies space in your cache. Not entirely sure why.

So if you inadvertenly pick a very large folder and mark it for offline, you could fill your harddrive up really quick.

(In your case, where you need to do an update, just quit the Box app, restart, and you should get that drive space back.)

Thanks for your response, David!
Indeed, I noticed old (and big) folders that were synched locally. Disabling the sync (and storing online only) freed up my cache diskspace.
Quite honestly, it doesn't make sense to me that the files would be in the normal folder structure as well as in a separate 'cache' location, but at least I'm getting some breathing room.

I continue to have Mac diskspace issue with 'System Data' eating up 150GB out of 250GB, but it won't be from this folder. The investigation continues.

I have the same issue, with constantly running out of disk space on macOS (11.6.8), and unable to work out why even when deleting things, I am not getting the space back. It seems that box is holding two copies (in /Users/<username>/Library/CloudStorage AND /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Box/Box/cache.

Deleting from the box folder is nor deleting my cache... so I have over 100Gb of space taken up, but only <50Gb of actual files that I have made available offline for use. As I'm using FPE mode, there is no way to adjust the Cache size either

Come on Box team - this is just bad design! A cache is a cache - not a duplicate. If I already have a copy locally I don't need it cached too. If I were to have it all online only, then keeping a cached copy for 30 days make perfect sense.

Given us the option to log out of Box Drive, and then force us to redownload the 30+Gb I have already downloaded, is not a reasonable solution.

Please Box team either fix this, or at least give us the mechanism to purge the cache and get some space back.

+1 - As of March 15, 2023, my Box Cache folder is over 250 GB.  Absolute nonsense.  I obviously don't have 250 GB  of files marked for offline use.  

Looking at the statement above:

---
For information about Box Drive's cache, Box Drive's cache size limit is set to 50% of your available local disk space with a maximum limit of 25GB and a minimum of 1GB. For the maximum cache duration limit it is set for 30 days by default.
---

250 GB is exactly 50% of my available total disk space of 500 GB. So clearly the "25 GB max" is not being applied. This is absolutely ridiculous. Please fix this so that a) the 25 GB max is actually APPLIED; and, b) users can clear the cache themselves.

This is absolutely ridiculous! Just discovered my Box Drive's hidden cache files are 269GB while actual offline files are only 98GB. How is this severe caching issue, reported 4 years ago, still unfixed in 2024? 

Such inefficient cache management in professional software is unacceptable - wasting nearly 3x more space in cache than actual data. This fundamental flaw has convinced me to abandon Box Drive completely.

Is anyone else still experiencing this? When will Box finally address this?

Hey guys, 

I'm having the same issue but on a MEGA scale. My box drive cache is 1.43TB in size. This is a complete joke!!

I've been struggling with disk space on a 4TB mac for some time and wondering what the system data is. I accidentally came across this folder and had a shock when I saw some of the individual files are over 25GB, let alone the folder. The largest file is 37GB. 

This is not acceptable to do this! 

Has anyone found a solution?

Hello,

Logging out of Box drive clears the box cache (https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043695894-Technical-Information-for-Box-Drive-Administrators#h_01HVKSCJN4XE3HDZ93BW4NYZKA).

I suggest logging out, checking that some space freed up on your disk and then log back in.