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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  2. Anonymous
    2020-10-04T00:24:08+00:00

    I also have this problem. Turned on Files On-Demand, Freed up space, and just upgraded to Catalina. Storage (Documents) took up more than 100GB. It helps that I unlink. But if I log back on, it sucks up the local storage again. Really hope that this gets fixed soon. Until then, I'll be using OneDrive online only. It's a shame that I can't open OneDrive as a folder on my laptop which was why I purchased it from the first place.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-09-29T08:29:49+00:00

    Same issue here. 

    OneDrive taking up 200GB of space for files I never actually had on my device. 

    Crippling both my iMac and MacBook.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-09-21T08:25:29+00:00

    I have the same problem, with documents on my OneDrive (that are all set to online-only) is showing up as taking up my Mac storage. 

    I was shown a prompt by my MacBook Air saying that my disk storage is low - I have just under 20% that is showing free at present. I suspect the OneDrive files (~50GB) are being taken into account.

    The whole point of having OneDrive is to remove files from my hard disk and store them in the cloud.

    Amazed to see how long this issue has been going on and how many people have raised it with no resolution. Microsoft, please can you fix this!

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-09-08T06:22:04+00:00

    Apple referred me back to Microsoft, saying it is a OneDrive issue. Which frankly, I believe when taking into account that Dropbox was having a similar issue which they were able to solve.

    After I got my response back from Apple, I send another message to Microsoft, wherein I also referred to the Dropbox community page where the same problem was listed and a solution was offered by that company.

    This was the response I got from Microsoft support on august 24th (translated from Dutch):

    Thank you for your detailed response.

    I have once again submitted the information you shared with us below to our Product Specialists, so that they can respond substantively.

    Of course, as soon as we receive a response, we will immediately resume contact with you.

    Thanks again for your patience and cooperation.

    I was planning to update you all here when I got a response. I just send them a message asking them if there is any progress.

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