To start off, I love Dropbox, it is a great service that allows you to sync 2GB to the cloud for free. It also allows you to share files with your friends and post files to a webserver so you can send it in an IM or email and they can see your file. It works great for small files and large a like, I have found it to be fast and reliable. Unfortunately it isn’t really free. I’m not talking about the premium you can pay to get more space, I’m talking about the cache files that it saves. I understand that all this data is saved across many other workstations on the internet which forms the cloud. This is great and I’m sure it saves them tons of money not having to pay for bandwidth and cloud storage at like S3, however… 12 GB of cache files on my computer is a bit unacceptable.
I noticed this when I was looking at my C drive wondering man why so low and I have not installed anything new or downloaded anything of significant size, and that’s when I found it 12GB of files in my C:\Documents and Settings\
I would like to make this point clear though, none of this would stop me from using Dropbox, it is a great free file sharing application, I will just watch those cache files and delete them once and a while.
I don’t know if Dropbox has changed their caching method over the last year, but my Dropbox has 1.7GB in it and the cache folder is a whopping 26MB – 13MB for each update exe that’s been applied since I originally installed it on this computer, and a few KB for misc files. I sync files back and forth across 3 PCs every single day, so it’s not from being idle. YMMV
They have in fact updated their caching process. It’s typically only a hundred megs or so total now so this is much improved over the several hundred gigs that it used to save in the cache.