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
    2020-11-11T03:41:23+00:00

    All,

    I saw one poster offered a quasi/workaround solution.  Go into Help & Settings --> Preferences; then click on the 'Account' tab - here you'll see an option to 'Choose Folders' for what is available to see on the Mac.

    If you deselect the folders that have lots of contents, then the 'About This Mac' storage bar chart will show it correctly.

    Obviously just a workaround because I don't see a solution to be able to:

    1. See those folders on your Mac AND
    2. Have the 'About This Mac' storage bar show properly what is actually on your Mac's SSD/HDD

    The other workaround is to ignore the bar and simply use the statement above showing X GB available of Y GB.

    Cheers,

    Nate

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-11-06T17:01:01+00:00

    I have the same issue,

    I don't understand why it has not been resolved nearly a year after it was reported.

    Has anyone successfully removed OneDrive and freed up space without a MacOS reinstall?

    Unlinking the account shows the 'hidden' space that OneDrive was using. Nearly 120GBs in my case.

    Update:

    I decided to try and clear down all of the hidden used 'update' space following unlinking the account.

    I installed the MacPaw CleanMyMac X software to try and do this.

    I went though all the clean up steps that that product offers, which helped me free up a lot of disk space, but it did not clear down the space left as 'other' after unlinking one drive.

    So I rebooted. After reboot all this 'other' space disappeared.

    Now this does not solve the issue of OneDrive using up more space, but at least it is possible to uninstall it and get that space back, you just need to reboot after unlinking - you don't need CleanMyMax X for that.

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

    I have the same issue. Please fix it!

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  4. 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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  5. Anonymous
    2020-10-27T22:23:22+00:00

    Same problem- fix it Microsoft you amateurs.

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