Huge RTCReporting Logs and Dropbox
One of our Macs kept filling up its SSD even though there isn’t supposed to be anything more stored on it. Photos is set to optimize its storage, and Messages is set to only keep messages for a year. It should be pretty much in a steady state, but we kept getting alerts from Mail that it couldn’t launch because there wasn’t enough free space. It’s an M4 MacBook Air used mostly for Web stuff, but somehow it felt as slow as the Intel one it had replaced.
I deleted unused apps and offloaded photos. Restarting sometimes helped, so I thought maybe it was an issue with Time Machine snapshots not being reclaimed promptly, which has been an issue before. But what data would even be changing so much to create large snapshots?
The problem kept getting worse, so I broke out OmniDiskSweeper. It didn’t find anything unusual, except it showed that the totals for the main folders added up to about 90 GB less than was reportedly used on SSD. Disk Utility showed that there were no snapshots taking up space. There must be real files but not ones that the app could see.
I relaunched OmniDiskSweeper using sudo, and it found a huge amount of stuff hidden in the root account: /private/var/root.
I had thought that wasn’t really used except when running Terminal from macOS Recovery. But apparently various daemons store all kinds of stuff there now. The /private/var/root/Library/Logs folder alone was using 74 GB, and there were also several multi-GB cache folders.
The logs were almost entirely from RTCReporting, and I’m not the only one to run into this.
I deleted the files using OmniDiskSweeper, but that didn’t help. It turns out that by default it moves files to the trash, and I guess since it was running under sudo this meant the invisible trash folder for the root account. It’s better to hold down the Option key to Delete Immediately.
After deleting the files and restarting the Mac, the free space looked right at first but then steadily dropped. Pretty soon there were again 5 GB of RTCReporting logs with the Mac just sitting there. I started using sudo du -h -d 2 /private/var/root/ to track how the sizes were changing. Within a day it was back up to 27 GB.
Activity Monitor showed that rtcreportingd and fileproviderd were each using almost 100% CPU constantly. I immediately suspected Dropbox because it had been working poorly on this Mac for a year or so. It wouldn’t keep files offline and constantly seemed to be syncing even when files weren’t changing. Sure enough, turning off Dropbox stopped the CPU use and the ballooning log files.
This was our last Mac still using Dropbox, so it seemed time to migrate it to iCloud Drive. The syncing problems ended up not being limited to keeping files offline. It couldn’t even reliably download most of them from the cloud to move them out of the Dropbox folder, instead reporting I/O errors for most files. And the files that I did move to the Documents folder never synced that deletion up to the cloud. I ended up just downloading the whole folder from the Web interface. iCloud Drive uploaded everything quickly and then settled into a state of no CPU use.
Previously:
- Sunsetting Maestral
- When Dropbox Spawns a Million Folders
- Tahoe Free Space Problems
- Fixing “Optimize Storage”
- Update on Cloud File Provider Extensions
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The irony of present-day Dropbox’s client being such a bloated upselling mess is that if I could just get the old client, I would happy pay for a Dropbox plan. But since I couldn’t, I just didn’t, and by the time Maestral appeared it was way too late.
I’m certain I don’t matter, because Slopbox just wants that enterprise money like every other rotted productivity app these days wants, but I’m also sure I’m not alone.
@Billyok Yes, and the other irony is that it worked so much better when it was a dirty hack vs. using the public file provider API.
Not a Dropbox person... @Billyok, why do you feel a need to change the tone in the comments to "Slopbox"? You were also one who added "Liquid Ass" to help all of us out. Not constructive, even you can admit this, right?
Your problems are so weird. I recently migrated my last files off iCloud because Dropbox just works and iCloud does not.
Have to agree with Beatrix. Have never had a problem with Dropbox though I do find that the FileProvider version not as good as the OG but that's the case with ALL of the FileProvider-based versions of these tools. I still don't think it's robust enough for any of them. That said, pretty sure you can still use the "dirty hack" if you want.
> Not a Dropbox person... @Billyok, why do you feel a need to change the tone in the comments to "Slopbox"? You were also one who added "Liquid Ass" to help all of us out. Not constructive, even you can admit this, right?
Why do you feel the need to make others change the tone of their comments?
If you can't detach from comments on website and think that everything must be written like you want it to be, the issue isn't in the tone but on your assumptions. You won't be able to change others but you can change the way you react which is far more constructive. Even you can admit this, right?
I’ve had the same Problem with iCloud so I ended up switching to infomaniak. It would constantly download files and if I removed them myself, it would immediately start redownloading the file I just removed
I’m not usually one to use that sort of language but I think “slopbox” gets a pass.
Anyone who has had the distinct displeasure of being forced to use it would agree, I would think.
On Windows especially it’s practically malware. It uses the same trick iCloud does but even more aggressively.
If one doesn’t carefully find and deselect the default options to sync everything right away, one generally finds oneself with a piece of extremely aggressive adware constantly popping up scarily worded warnings that the user is out of space and needs to buy more right now.
I sincerely do not understand why anyone would use it in this day and age. Many many years ago when there were not many things like it and they seemed to care at least a little about their users, maybe.
These days it might as well have its picture in the dictionary next to “enshittification”
Dave, I can’t take credit for Liquid Ass, that was someone else. But it’s just a little joke and I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again. I’m going to go call the tone police and turn myself in. If I do hard time it’s been a pleasure knowing all of you.
@billyok... apologies, and please, peace.
Maybe it's the political climate here i the US. Maybe it's the amount of Apple-bashing going on i the comments here. Or maybe I simply was having a bad day. I deserve every bit of criticism I received - and think I know when it's time for me to stop commenting for a while.
It's too easy to use words that, well, really don't add anything constructive when all you are doing is writing a comment on somebody else's blog. It's even harder to recognize that a comment - like I made - does exactly the same thing I was accusing you of... which is not being constructive. I'm sure you had a reason (if not, others do) to think it's helping out things by coining a word/term without, say, explaining why. @Bart? Read his comment - while very critical of Dropbox, it also contained the one valid piece of criticism I (wrongly) thought I was mentioning about your first comment - details.
Again, my comment displayed even better what I meant to be critical about. Do not worry - I'm not the "tone police". But I'm definitely guilty of sounding like it. Please accept my apology all.
> Slopbox just wants that enterprise money like every other rotted productivity app these days wants
Well, what are they supposed to do?
For Dropbox specifically, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, OneDrive, already offer clones built right into the OS. So the _basic_ functionality is an area that's tough to compete on.
And then for software in general, software is very expensive to produce, and users generally aren't willing to pay up-front for it. So you make it a subscription, or ad-based, or you pivot to enterprise, where customers are used to five figures and beyond.
Also hard to tell if this specific bug is on Dropbox or Apple. Conceptually, File Provider sounds like the right kind of API for this problem, but in practice, I hear about all kinds of issues, and Apple generally isn't very transparent.
Or provides much in the way of diagnostics. Though, with this bug in particular, maybe they do!
> Well, what are they supposed to do?
I dunno, both? Get that enterprise bag but also be the best in class consumer-grade syncing solution that made you famous in the first place?
