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
    2020-12-31T04:37:48+00:00

    Even more explicit evidence that these files are simply not removed - or at least not in a manner that MacOS recognizes. When I go into "manage storage", it shows files which I have already set as online-only (by choosing "free up space") as still existing on the hard drive.

    This is a huge headache. 

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-12-23T16:50:09+00:00

    I just wasted a week talking to microsoft support, and they had no solution for me. 

    Has this issue been resolved. This thread is still showing that the issue is unresolved and I do not see Microsoft Support responding anymore. 

    Please help!

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-12-21T14:43:49+00:00

    Just wondering if there is any further updates on this? I have a few users that are experiencing the same issue. One of which recently upgraded to Big Sur and has made no difference.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-12-09T10:26:24+00:00

    First thanks a lot for taking the time to share your results.

    You suggest that the problem could be solved by resetting the mac, I have already done that a few months ago with Catalina only for the problem to reappear even after big sur upgrade.

    So please, could you try to delete some files locally and inspect if the change in size of the folder is registered and tell us the result ?

    That would be very helpful because, resetting my mac a second time would be rather painful and this time I want to be sure it is helpful.

    Also, if it ever caught the attention of Microsoft software engineers :

    Big Sur does not fix the problem.

    I have installed Big Sur, but the problem is still there, see attached image.

    As you can see, I have made a local copy of one of my folder which is on the cloud, then I deleted some files locally.

    After verification, the files were also deleted in the cloud, and the size of the folder on the cloud diminished, however the size of the folder remained the same locally.

    I have waited 20 days, expecting that Mac Os could register the change in size but 20 days later the problem is still on.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-11-26T01:27:33+00:00

    Hi all, this thread is the closest I've come to figuring out what is going on with my mac and getting rid of the 70GB+ being taken up by One Drive in Other . I've downloaded Big Sur but can't complete the install because I need an additional 30GB of space. Does any one have any ideas?

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