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
    2021-08-19T15:33:41+00:00

    I'm not sure if this will help any of you out but I was having the same issues with Dropbox and One Drive. I thought both were taking up most of my HD space even though I had all my files set to online only. I have a brand new iMac that has 256 HD and storage was saying that 116gb were being taken up by "other". I am a graphic designer and use photoshop every day. I then quit photoshop and watched that 116 go all the way down to 27gb. photoshop was using my HD as a scratch disk. I am now going to get a TB external and set that as the scratch disk for PS. voila!

    not sure if any of you are also using PS but this took care of the problem for me. there is still 23gb being taken up by "other" but I can live with that.

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-08-11T09:16:51+00:00

    Hey Nikola,

    thanks for the nice advise :) if I have no more space left and really need to do that I will turn off files on demand. The problem with this is for me that I have a very big folder structure and really need my directory tree as I need many files "on demand". and I hardly can plan which ones this will be as I have to look up some stuff when it comes up. But as there is perhaps no other possibility to fix this I think this is the best way to go.

    Thanks again and have a nice day :)

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  3. Anonymous
    2021-08-11T07:57:57+00:00

    Hi Max,

    I hope Microsoft will fix this issue, it is very cumbersome to deal with it.

    I have previously posted a solution that have worked for me (a few comments back there is detail description)

    My solution is to not use "files on demand", and instead use "choose folders" and manually select which folders do you want to have in cloud, and which folders do you want to be downloaded to the computer.

    It is much easier to use Time Machine to restore files and apps (as I described previously), so that you don't bother with resetting the one drive and other apps

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  4. Anonymous
    2021-08-11T07:24:13+00:00

    Im afraid we are a microsoft company and I cannot use another program or vendor as the company VDI only supports One Drive... so this is not an option for me I am afraid....

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  5. Anonymous
    2021-08-11T07:16:40+00:00

    Yes, I have found a solution.

    I have moved from Onedrive to iCloud.

    Job sorted.

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