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
    2020-10-16T12:39:33+00:00

    This is a pretty awful problem. I installed it on my previous 2017 Macbook Pro which only had 256 Gig Hard drive. It took up 3/4 of my entire drive. When I tried to uninstall it, the files still took up the “other” storage bucket. A true nightmare that I desperately tried to solve.

    Now with my new machine, I refuse to install One Drive. I use Cyber Duck or Mountain Duck to access my files. When Apple One comes out, I may move all my files out to their cloud and cancel my Office subscription all together (we can just use my husbands school access to Office). 

    I would prefer not to do this. Please make fixing this a priority.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-10-16T11:11:04+00:00

    I have same problem.

    Microsoft, please fix this annoying issue. Don't wrote this: unlink, delete, resync, restart, and reset. This is not solution. The solution this: you need to code a changes, for solve this annoying bug!!! We can't change the mac OneDrive app sourcecode! Yes, you need to make this change, we can't!!!

    Thank You.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-10-16T10:26:26+00:00

    I am having the same kind of problems.  My mac is clearly storing OneDrive files locally, even though I used OnDemand only.  What is worse is that using OnDemand now means that when I try to use the file it downloads it again basically, so using twice as much space.  Somewhere on my mac is a shadow version of all my OneDrive files and I can't find it to get rid of it!

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-10-16T03:17:14+00:00

    I'm having the same problem. All of these files are being shown as taking up space but have 0 bytes in them.  My SSD drive is filled with several hundred gigabytes of files that both are and aren't there. This is a huge mess. I really wish someone would keep looking into this. 

    I paid for a full year already since I heard such good things about the service, but it's been ruining my computer for months. For a long time I thought it was related to something completely different and I've wasted so much time deleting each new set of files that weren't being backed up to One Drive because the multi-gigabyte files with 0 actual data in them are taking up all of my hard drive space.

    Microsoft, please fix this or tell us that you don't know how or can't divert resources to fixing it, or just give us a refund!

    Thanks to everyone, both users and the Microsoft people that have tried to help to at least. some degree!

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-10-13T19:27:00+00:00

    Just want to add another brick to the wall.  I have experienced the exact same problem since installing OneDrive on my Macbook well over a year ago.

    I love the concept of file storage that takes up no space on your local hard drive but gives you full access to the file in the cloud. I use Google's File Stream to accomplish the same purpose for my work files on my Macbook and have no issues. Just wish I could use OneDrive for my personal files to do the same.   

    I hope that MS recognizes the number of people experiencing this issue and finds a solution.

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