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
    2020-06-27T10:03:05+00:00

    Good question Miles. I've been wondering the same thing.

    In the past week, I've been in mail and phone contact with Microsoft customer service employees about this issue. As it happens, I've sent them a link to this conversation this very morning. I hope that this will speed things along, but of course there is no way to be sure this goes up the chain form there.

    Anyway, should a solution come out of my contact with customer service, I will post it here.

    In the meantime, I’ve had a few back and forth e-mails with the customer service employee. After a couple of suggestions (such as uninstall/reinstall OneDrive) that did not work, she was unable to help me. 

    I’ve made screencast-videos that show how I followed the suggestions she gave me and how they didn’t work. And I’ve shared those videos with the customer service employee. 

    This morning I received an e-mail from her that the issue and my screencast-videos have been send to the "product team" for further examination.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-06-29T09:16:38+00:00

    Similar situation here. Lots emails exchanged along with screenshots of storage use. I think they (or at least my contact) is struggling to get their head around the fact that although the files on disk size is shown as X and the folder size as 100 X , it is the folder size( 100X) that is being used to calculate the space taken on the Mac when it should the files on disk size X.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-07-05T09:35:45+00:00

    I literally have the same problem. I tried freeing up the space but in the memory management it still shows that 23 GB (the amount of data in my cloud) is taken up...i am really thinking about deleting OneDrive and making some kind of link on my desktop....

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-07-05T11:00:50+00:00

    Cracked it.

    Not sure which element of the following fixed the issue, but fixed it is.

    1. Created more space on Mac by choosing not to show two Onedrive folders with very high volume content.

    2)Turned off files on demand

    1. Wait until OneDrive has synced all files to Mac.
    2. Turned on files on demand.
    3. Wait until OneDrive has synced all files to Mac.
    4. Selected Make all folders available.

    It appears that this has sorted the issue, at least for the time being.

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