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

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

158 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2020-05-03T18:37:09+00:00

    I'm also having the same problem. My whole OneDrive of 117Gb (minus one excel spreadsheet) is "files on demand" enabled. Going on About this Mac>Storage shows my 128Gb is nearly full, in fact it says I have 145Gb of files which is interesting. The recommendation list of what to delete to free up space lists a lot of the content of my OneDrive, however when I go on file browser my OneDrive folder is no where near this 117Gb. 

    I am running the latest version of Catalina. A fix for this would be brilliant, or even a response from Microsoft.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2020-04-27T19:57:45+00:00

    Installing this application dumped 1000s of 0k files on my drive, obfuscating 100s of important local files. I can't delete them and it renders Storage Management useless. This was a feature?

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2020-04-24T17:47:11+00:00

    I had that same issue, not being able to install Catalina. I took all my One Drive files offline, folder by folder. After that the problem was still not solved, but I could somehow install Catalina. I still have the same issue though...

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2020-04-24T17:47:11+00:00

    Just want to add some info to my previous post.

    After updating to Catalina my Storage Indicator still counts "Documents" (including OneDrive folder) size including all files that are actually in the "cloud" (near 30Gigs in my case). But if I go to Storage/Manage/File Browser I can see that OneDrive folder size counts only files that are actually on my local disk (near 300Mb in my case). Before updating to Catalina, OneDrive folder size was equal to all files size, including files in the cloud.

    So now I can actually add files to my disk despite of Storage Indicator shows that My Documents occupy more space than my disk actually is :)

    Also free disk space is displayed right.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2020-04-24T11:27:52+00:00

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

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments