One drive online files take space on Macbook

Anonymous
2019-12-16T05:50:07+00:00

I have One Drive installed on my MacBook.

When right-click on the One Drive icon in my Finder and click “get info” it says under size:

172.298.589.945 bytes (39,5 GB on disk) for 57.162 items.

So the way I interpret this is that only 39,5 GB should take space on my Macbook disk. Which is in line with the documents I store offline on my mac (some pictures and music)

However, when I look at the actual disk space used (I click apple icon on home screen, click “about this mac” and then under Storage tab it shows me that my stored documents use 178,4GB. And with that my Mac storage is almost full.

I have no other documents on my Mac, I keep everything in One Drive or ICloud. Icloud is totally online, no files are offline. And One Drive I have only a few files offline.

So why does it seem to take all my storage nevertheless?

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-01-21T19:17:14+00:00

    I have the same issue. I have a Mac Mini with a measly 256gb storage. My onedrive for Personal and Work are consuming my precious space even though I have Files on Demand enabled.

    macOS: Monterey 12.1

    OneDrive: installed from MS Office install, not App Store, Version: 21.245.1128.0002 (Standalone)

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-11-29T22:16:37+00:00

    I can confirm that on a brand new Macbook M1 Pro, a clean install, no migration etc one drive is finally working as it should.

    FINALLY!!

    I hope anyone else on here who had the issue has also had it resolved by upgrading to Monterey.

    Thank you all.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-01-06T22:08:05+00:00

    Hi,

    To back up files, you could just check OneDrive website, where all files uploaded successfully are shown. As I mentioned before, the known display issue won't affect normal work of Mac and OneDrive, but you could send feedback to Apple to let them notice this weird behaviour. And IMO unlinking may not make sense to this problem, since all files in OneDrive have been online only.

    Best regards,

    Oliver

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-12-18T13:37:30+00:00

    Hi Mirjam,

    Thanks for the updates, and we have received the info you provided.

    1. Those folders having online-only status doesn't mean all files in that folder have the same status, otherwise, it won't display 38.7 GB on the disk.
    2. Files in OneDrive are 172GB, more than 121GB(the total capacity of Macintosh HD), so I think those files on-demand are not likely to take up local storage.

    We did a test on Mojave with a OneDrive account that contains 20GB files, after signing in OneDrive on that Mac, the total available storage didn't change, although it displays 20GB when we navigate to Manage storage page, as we discussed before, it's an identification issue of Mac Finder.

    Anyway, to help determine the cause of the problem, I suggest you select and right-click the OneDrive client folder->Free up space. Then all files in the folder would be stored online-only, and this is also to save the space for upgrading MacOS.

    If files with online-only icon still take up the local storage, we could only suggest you unlink OneDrive(click OneDrive icon on the ribbon->More->Preferences->Account->Unlink ) then delete those files, after upgrading to Catalina, you could sign in OneDrive again.

    Best regards,

    Oliver

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-12-17T10:19:57+00:00

    Hi Mirjam,

    Thanks for the updates. We did some tests on that but without luck, we could not reproduce the issue you met. Could you tell me how much storage taken by OneDrive is shown in the Manage Storage dialog if you click File Browser? ( Apple->About this Mac->Storage->Manage->File Browser)

    I have initiated PM invitation for you, and you could share some screenshots via this link.

    Since you mentioned you need to keep some files on the device, we will help you narrow down the issue cause first, before try unlinking OneDrive or Free up storage space.

    We appreciate your understanding and patience: )

    Best regards,

    Oliver

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