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
    2020-10-05T15:09:26+00:00

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

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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
    2020-10-05T05:24:38+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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  4. Anonymous
    2020-10-04T11:08:58+00:00

    It is really frustrating that Microsoft is not addressing this. Thanks for sharing your solution to move to Dropbox instead. Just so we know, where can this setting that you mentioned be found?

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-10-04T02:39:31+00:00

    I have started this post on this platform last year December. Since then many people are following it and sharing the same issue. Yet Microsoft does nothing that indicated they are working on this or taking our question seriously. 

    So I bought 2TB storage on Dropbox and I am moving all my files there. No more OneDrive for me, it's useless on a Mac. 

    Funny fact: Dropbox had the same issue with Mac. They explain that it's because Mac counts the "logic storage" that a file takes, instead of "actual storage", even when it's stored online. However, with Dropbox you just toggle a setting and your problem is solved. So if they can solve it, why can't Microsoft? Perhaps because they don't care, they will sell their office products anyway and OneDrive is just sold along with it.

    Anyway, goodbye OneDrive, hello Dropbox (or iCloud if you prefer)

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