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
    2020-05-04T10:46:06+00:00

    I got some help from Microsoft and found that I needed the latest version of OneDrive on my MacBook which shows in Finder which files /folders are using disk space vs cloud (little cloud icons). Right click for 'Get Info' confirms cloud based OneDrive files are using zero disk space.

    The problem occurs in Macbook Storage Management which recognises OneDrive files as using space when they are not. So don't go deleting files yet until you've got the new OneDrive for MacBook and do some checking. I tried to post a query on Apple support but it didn't go through today. Will try tomorrow. 

    I hope that's helpful.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-05-04T10:33:56+00:00

    I have raised this issue last December 2019. Since then many people have flagged they have the similar issue. But Microsoft is not responding anymore, or so it seems.

    Too bad, as for me One Drive is becoming totally useless now. I consider to quit my subscription with Microsoft and use Dropbox or iCloud instead. This works very fine on Catalina.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-04-29T09:23:06+00:00

    OneDrive appears to be taking up 50gb of space on my MacBook as well even though I have Files on Demand turned on. These files are showing up as on my Macbook in my storage management. I have upgraded to Catalina. Any ideas?

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-04-24T15:24:45+00:00

    It seems the problem was fixed for me after updating to MacOS Catalina.

    I am running Catalina and still have the problem.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-04-24T11:34:57+00:00

    I still have this problem even reinstall MacOS Catalina.

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