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
    2020-10-05T05:24:38+00:00

    Hi, yes of course!

    Actually, when I installed the Dropbox app on my MacBook the app notified me of this issue and also provides information how to solve it. It's easy.

    Log in to your web dropbox account (not in the app but on internet) and go to "Settings" (under your initial icon, top right corner). 

    Scroll down to Preferences, here you will find at the bottom the preference "Smart Sync Update for Mac". Toggle this on. And you are all set.

    I moved my biggest files now to Dropbox, some smaller ones are still in OneDrive. When I open " About this Mac" and "Storage" and then "Manage" I can still see that under documents there are some documents taking up space. These are all OneDrive documents which are not stored offline. So it is really, really OneDrive that is not solving this issue.

    Good luck with it!

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-10-05T09:11:30+00:00

    Thank you so much for taking the time to write your detailed reply! 

    I might have to go down the same route shortly if Microsoft continues to do nothing about it as I'm running out of space on my Mac.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-10-05T15:09:26+00:00

    Just throwing my frustrations into the pile here. Microsoft needs to fix this fast.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-10-13T19:27:00+00:00

    Just want to add another brick to the wall.  I have experienced the exact same problem since installing OneDrive on my Macbook well over a year ago.

    I love the concept of file storage that takes up no space on your local hard drive but gives you full access to the file in the cloud. I use Google's File Stream to accomplish the same purpose for my work files on my Macbook and have no issues. Just wish I could use OneDrive for my personal files to do the same.   

    I hope that MS recognizes the number of people experiencing this issue and finds a solution.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-10-16T03:17:14+00:00

    I'm having the same problem. All of these files are being shown as taking up space but have 0 bytes in them.  My SSD drive is filled with several hundred gigabytes of files that both are and aren't there. This is a huge mess. I really wish someone would keep looking into this. 

    I paid for a full year already since I heard such good things about the service, but it's been ruining my computer for months. For a long time I thought it was related to something completely different and I've wasted so much time deleting each new set of files that weren't being backed up to One Drive because the multi-gigabyte files with 0 actual data in them are taking up all of my hard drive space.

    Microsoft, please fix this or tell us that you don't know how or can't divert resources to fixing it, or just give us a refund!

    Thanks to everyone, both users and the Microsoft people that have tried to help to at least. some degree!

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