One drive online files take space on Macbook

Im noticing the same thing, except to take it one step further my one drive syncs to an external drive.

My macHD shwos 126gb of 512free

The 1TB External shows 815gb of 1TB free.

285GB on the macHD are taken up by SYSTEM stuff. If i "free up space on the external" the macHD

It seems like the macOS and onedrive are not communicating properly with whats actually being used, as I dont believe the storage is actually full, though if you get to a point where you dont have enough space it wont let you install document.

Yes, I have found a solution.

I have moved from Onedrive to iCloud.

Job sorted.

I had this problem for a couple of years. It was hard to describe to anyone from the technical support team, especially when there is no coordination between MS and Apple. Since there are many people with this problem now, I will share my solution that I came across using many trials and errors, and internet forums.

I am using iMac 21.5 late 2012 macOS 10.15.7 Catalina with an aftermarket SSD 480gb installed by professional service and I believe this problem is not happening on HDD.

For this solution to work, my recommendation for using OneDrive is to not have "files on demand" turned on. It seams that there is a bug in software that reserves the local storage for the files that you think they are just "online", because if you check in Finder, those files are indeed "online". When you check apple storage, this space would be called "other".

My solution is to not use "files on demand", and instead use "choose folders" and manually select which folders do you want to have in cloud, and which folders do you want to be downloaded to the computer. Down side of this is that you don't have a complete visual structure of your folders on one drive, but I think it is worth it. Anytime you could go online and see the structure of the folders, and only keep the important folders locally. If you accidentally checked the box to turn on "files on demand", like I did, then you already have the same problem again, and you should follow these steps to recover your free space.

I have a workaround that had worked for me (as I type this, I am doing these steps again).
1 - Back up all files and programs that you need (the best way is to use Apple Time Machine backup, because I find cumbersome to reinstall all the apps)

2 - Create a bootable installer of macOS How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

3 - Follow these instructions to enter "recovery mode" on macOS. Erase and reinstall macOS - Apple Support

This step was difficult for me, because I couldn't enter recovery mode easily. In my experience (trial and error), only the Apple keyboard that came with iMac would respond to "Cmd+R". On the forums I have found that someone presses "option" key (other name for alt, for those who are less familiar) or combo "option+cmd", but this didn't work for me.

If you've followed instruction from the apple website, you'll see it is important to format drive before installing a fresh macOS, otherwise this solution will not work.

4 - After clean install of macOS, just enter Time Machine and restore your files, programs and settings.

5 - Use OneDrive with "files on demand" option turned off

I've used this solution twice. A year ago, I didn't have enough space to update macOS, it was frustrating to solve. Now I am doing it again, because I have accidentally clicked the "files on demand" box when reinstalling OneDrive for some other bug, and it consumed all my storage yet again. In short, OneDrive is more bugy on macs than dropbox in my experience. To be fair, they have improved significantly over the years, but unfortunately they didn't solved this particular problem.

Hi, since you could reproduce the issue, Please go to OneDrive->More->Feedback, to send feedbacks inside the app.This is to let the product team notice this weird behavior. W have recognized the repro steps and result, and appreciate your understanding and patience.

Thanks,

Oliver

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

Dear Oliver,

First of all Happy New Year! Due to the holidays it took me a while to get back on this.

I tried to free up space as you suggested, now all my files are only online. 

When I check my storage says now 63,48 GB available of 121,12 GB - so it seems to has freed up some space. But under Documents it still states I am using 180,38 GB space. And it shows big files which are only online according to One Drive. So it still looks weird. 

At least I managed to do the upgrade to Catalina, so that is something. But even after the upgrade is is still showing the same. 

I really do not know what else to try, apart from unlinking my One Drive completely. Can I make a back-up somewhere before I do this? I do not want to loose all my files through a mistake.

thanks again

Mirjam