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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?
A Microsoft file hosting and synchronization service.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
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.
Yeah I doubt Apple will address this - their Storage Management application works just fine. I think Microsoft saw evidence that the file 'technically' wasn't taking up space so 'problem solved'. But this issue won't go away until they can account for the fact the files are telling something they are taking space.
I think Sirisy hit the nail on the head back on page 5 by linking to the Dropbox version of this issue thread . Microsoft engineers should take a look at it.
My place of work also has Dropbox Business Enterprise, which funnily enough in their web settings has an option to specifically address this very issue. I was enjoying the integration with Office 365/office/teams, but I am now forced to move over to dropbox.
This also shows the laziness of the OneDrive team, typical Microsoft i suppose. Always find a way to mess things up.
I had suspected they might go this way. Passing the buck is so much easier.
They should really take down the "Free up space" feature. In practical terms "Free up space" does absolutely nothing of the sort.
I work with massive video files and was using Free up space as a quasi archive. I had hoped that right click free up space would.. free up that space on my SSD, whilst leaving the file structure to easily return to old projects on demand as needed.
Playing with another file after reading this stack exchange post:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/436314/how-to-get-the-physical-size-of-a-file-in-linux
"ls -l will give you the apparent size of the file, which is the number of bytes a program would read if it read the file from start to finish. du would give you the size of the file "on disk"."
I tried these commands:
$ ls -l /Users/me/OneDrive\ -\ Me/test_file.pdf -rwxrwxrwx@ 1 me staff 511K Jul 23 15:37 /Users/me/OneDrive\ -\ Me/test_file.pdf $ du -h /Users/me/OneDrive\ -\ Me/test_file.pdf 0B /Users/me/OneDrive\ -\ Me/test_file.pdf
The "apparent size" of my test file was 511k, while the "size of the file on disk" is 0B. My hunch is MacOS is using the "apparent size" and not the "size of the file on disk" when computing available space in Storage Management.