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
    2021-01-27T13:57:50+00:00

    Hey Eric,

    Its a fellow dutch huy here.

    So i have this issue with some of my clients who use a Mac.

    I will clarify the exact steps i did:

    1. Unlink Onedrive
    2. Deleted the local files (which shouldnt be there anyway)
    3. Linked Onedrive again and made sure files on demand is turned on.

    End result:

    Files are still coming back and using local space.
    Ive tried the option to "Clear room" (ruimte vrijmaken) multiple times.
    Then i identified that the files came from Sharepoint which is linked in Onedrive.
    So i deleted the sync between Sharepoint and Onedrive and only used the option to make a shortcut to onedrive.

    But still these files will sync and take up local space.

    Any advice would be welcome.

    PS im not a Mac expert at all.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-11-03T15:13:55+00:00

    I have the same issue. Please fix it!

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-10-30T16:45:00+00:00

    This is terrible. We're also seeing this issue too. You do realize that "you dont have to worry because its not actually taking up that space" but IT IS. MacOS will not allow any software to install, or downloads when the storage is full. MacOS is assuming the storage is full. This makes OneDrive completely useless on MacOS because its taking up all that space, it doesnt matter if the files actually exist or not. MACOS ASSUMES THEY DO. It would be better if the files actually existed so you dont have to download them each time if that was the case since the OS already assumes the files are there. Microsoft needs to fix this issue. Dropbox and Google Drive do not have this issue.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-06-23T17:23:26+00:00

    Here are the facts:

    1. There's 888GB of files on my 250GB HD
    2. There's 71GB free on my 25GB HD
    3. OneDrive is only taking up 16GB

    Please Microsoft... what the actual f**k is happening? 

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-04-24T15:17:57+00:00

    It seems the problem was fixed for me after updating to MacOS Catalina.

    Good to hear!

    For reasons that are probably uninteresting to any/everyone I'm not ready to upgrade to Catalina. 

    One reason, though not the major one at the moment, is that the space issue described above prevents me from having the available HD room to install.

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