One drive online files take space on Macbook

MBP with Catalina and One Drive Files on Demand with same problem. 

Very frustrating to not be able to use space. 

After trying

• OneDrive syncs (Always keep, Free up Space) cycles
• OneDrive local purges (unlink, delete everything, clear Library references, etc) and reinstall (including App Store version and non-app store version

The only way I could get the space (35GB) released was to create a new user profile on my MBP and switch to it. Once I'd moved everything over, I deleted the original user profile and the space was reclaimed (freed from OneDrive). 

Such a shame - using OneDrive Files on Demand had become an important part of my workflow for redundancy. Now I'm hesitant to use it!

To the MS team, I've filed this in feedback. I really hope this gets addressed.

I have the same issue, however I have had this same problem with Dropbox before I switched to OneDrive. A huge portion of my Macintosh HD disk is taken up by greyed out "other" storage, and when you click on "manage storage", all those files that are OneDrive only are showing up. If you delete them, you gain that space, but if you then put them on OneDrive again, even if purely online, your available space decreases again by that amount. Clearly the Mac is counting these fields towards storage, and the frustrating thing about that is that you run out of space. It's not just cosmetic as the responses here have tried to suggest. I find myself constantly having to empty my recycling because I'm working with a free space of just 3 GB by now. 

Ok so I figured it out! It definitely was a Mac problem. From what I've read elsewhere, it has to do with a failed Catalina install. Catalina creates a new volume on your disk called Macintosh HD - Data, in addition to the disk that's already there called Macintosh HD. And somehow most of that volume was greyed out for me as "other." To fix it I started up in recovery/safe mode (hold shift during startup), then went to disk utilities, clicked on the Macintosh HD - Data volume and first unmounted it and then erased it (simply erasing it might be sufficient). Voila! All that hard space was recovered. See here for instructions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496 

FYI now that I've reconnected OneDrive, it still does that weird thing where it shows all your OneDrive files as taking up a ton of space when you click on "manage" in the about my Mac/storage utility, but this doesn't affect my free space anymore. I went from hovering at 10 gig free space with a lot of babying, to now having 440 gig free space. 

*** NOTE: make sure you do a full backup of all your files to an external drive before erasing the - Data volume, I forgot to mention that earlier.

I have the same issue. And of course: files on demand IS enabled.

I've tried stop syncing all folders to my Mac, only keeping them in the OneDrive cloud.

At that time, when I check the storage, the GB's of data that used to be 'Documents' gets named 'Other'.

After syncing the folders to my Mac again, the GB's of data is named 'Documents' once more.

My company replaced Dropbox with OneDrive — migrating the files from the former to the latter.

So there are were the same collective size of files syncing in both places — and i did NOT run out of space on my laptop with Dropbox using their form of selective sync.

I resolved my issue with this by uninstalling Onedrive and reinstalling and turning off 'Files on Demand'. Files on Demand reserved my whole Mac storage. This is a Onedrive issue and this needs to be fixed. Without Files on Demand I enabled one folder that will sync to the cloud and vica versa, this is my workaround for using Onedrive on MacOS.