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
    2020-08-20T17:02:22+00:00

    Okay, so I have spoken with Apple Mac support. Luckily, the people I spoke to were very helpful.

    They determined that the on demand OneDrive files on my Macbook take up no disk space. While the storage management application thinks the files do take up the space they would if I were to download them all.

    After which they escalated the issue to Apple engineers.

    For this, they asked me to supply them with certain screenshots with proof of the issue and a dmg-file with captured disk data (what happens to the disk when I have a file on demand, download it and then clear it from my hard drive again).

    I have also shared my entire mail-history with OneDrive support with them and supplied them with the link to this community-page.

    A support professional will call me when there is a response from the engineering team.

    Fingers crossed.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-08-20T17:11:13+00:00

    Looks like you had much more success than when I communicated with apple. The apple technicians seemed convinced that the issue was a OneDrive issue.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-08-20T20:50:27+00:00

    It's nice that tier 1 Apple support has acknowledged it, but I doubt they will put much effort in to it. 

    This really is a Microsoft issue, as they are the ones selling a feature called "Free Up Space" that in practice does absolutely nothing. 

    Dropbox has already created/tested/implemented a fix for it, so there is really no excuse.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-08-23T02:07:14+00:00

    The exactly same problem happens with my macOS Catalina and One Drive.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-08-23T10:58:50+00:00

    I hate to be another one with the same statement, but "I have this problem, too", however I've managed to drill it down to something in particular.

    I found that my OneDrive folder was telling me it was taking up 10GB on disk. I knew my entire OneDrive was much more than this so I started going through folder by folder. I've found one large file that won't disappear when I click (free up space). It's just one 10GB file that's causing all the problems.

    Hope this helps towards other info people may have.

    UPDATE: - I logged onto OneDrive via a browser and simply moved the problem file to another folder in my account. Once synced to my Mac, the file size on disc went to zero and now I have lots of space!

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