Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | MacOS
A Microsoft file hosting and synchronization service.
I believe the post from January 24th pointed to this explanation:
OneDrive on mac is keeping two copies of all downloaded files
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Anonymous
Environment:
MacOS: 12.4 (21F79)
Mac filesystem type hosting OneDrive folder: APFS Data Volume: /dev/disk1s1 on /System/Volumes/Data (apfs, local, journaled, nobrowse)
OneDrive: 22.131.0619.0001 (Standalone)
OneDrive home account as part of Microsoft 365 Personal subscription
OneDrive folder: ~/OneDrive, symlink to /Users/mikaelkjaerulff/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal
OneDrive “Files On-Demand” is off by selecting “Download all OneDrive files now”
OneDrive “File collaboration” is off
OneDrive status is “Your files are synced” and there are no warnings/errors
OneDrive storage: 134 GB used of 1.01 TB (as reported by https://onedrive.live.com/?v=managestorage)
I have discovered that OneDrive keeps 2 local copies of all the synced files. So instead of taking up 134 GB of disk space it uses 268 GB – that can’t be right! The (I assume) primary copy is in the OneDrive folder:
~/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/
And then there is the (I assume) secondary (or internal?) copy in:
~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/
This is true copies of the files, not hard-linked files – I checked that it is different inodes:
> cd ~/Library
> ls -i CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/ActivitiesData.xlsx Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/ActivitiesData.xlsx
8965664803 CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/ActivitiesData.xlsx
8965664807 Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/ActivitiesData.xlsx
There are some differences. If I run a diff on the two locations, like:
> cd ~/Library
> diff -rq CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/ Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive | grep -v .DS_Store > ~/tmp/diff.txt
Note that I exclude Mac Spotlight files (.DS_Store) – Spotlight does not run on the secondary copy. I get:
> cat -v ~/tmp/diff.txt
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/: .Trash
Only in Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Ejerforeningen matr. nr. 146 Hareskov By, Værløse/Billag/2021: 2021-01-14 ?M-^Ersoversigt.PDF
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Ejerforeningen matr. nr. 146 Hareskov By, Værløse/Billag/2021: 2021-01-14 A?M-^Jrsoversigt.PDF
Only in Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Ejerforeningen matr. nr. 146 Hareskov By, Værløse/Billag/2021: 2021-02-17 SEAS-NVE - årsopgørelse.pdf
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Ejerforeningen matr. nr. 146 Hareskov By, Værløse/Billag/2021: 2021-02-17 SEAS-NVE - a?M-^Jrsopgørelse.pdf
Only in Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Ejerforeningen matr. nr. 146 Hareskov By, Værløse/Billag/2021: 2021-03-22 Novafos - årsregning 2020.pdf
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Ejerforeningen matr. nr. 146 Hareskov By, Værløse/Billag/2021: 2021-03-22 Novafos - a?M-^Jrsregning 2020.pdf
Only in Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Ejerforeningen matr. nr. 146 Hareskov By, Værløse/Billag/2021: 2021-12-31 ?M-^Ersoversigt.PDF
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Ejerforeningen matr. nr. 146 Hareskov By, Værløse/Billag/2021: 2021-12-31 A?M-^Jrsoversigt.PDF
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/IMPO/sed0.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/IMPO/sed0.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/IMPO/sed2.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/IMPO/sed2.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/KULD/sed0.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/KULD/sed0.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/KULD/sed2.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/KULD/sed2.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/PROV/sed2.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/PROV/sed2.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/PROV.KRITIK/sed0.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/PROV.KRITIK/sed0.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/PROV.PRID/sed2.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/PROV.PRID/sed2.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/RYGI/sed0.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/RYGI/sed0.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/RYGI/sed2.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/RYGI/sed2.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/RYGS/sed2.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/RYGS/sed2.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/UDST/sed1.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/UDST/sed1.txt differ
Files CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/UDST/sed2.txt and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/UDST/sed2.txt differ
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/WWW/nsdgk: index.htm~
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/WWW/nsdgk: tilmeld.htm~
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/WWW/nsdgk: tilmeld_ver.htm~
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/WWW/nsdgk/traen: lydighed.htm~
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/WWW/nsdgk/traen: ring.htm~
Only in CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/WWW/nsdgk/traen: spor.htm~
I see the following main differences:
- Symlinks in primary are converted into normal files with content of the symlink in the secondary.
- Some file names are converted (like ?M-^Ersoversigt.PDF to årsregning 2020.pdf).
- Looks like some emacs backup-files are not copied to the secondary location and not uploaded to the cloud.
(1)
Symlinks are converted to normal files:
> ls -l "CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/IMPO/sed0.txt" "Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/IMPO/sed0.txt"
lrwxrwxr-x 1 mikaelkjaerulff staff 18 Jun 17 20:01 CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/IMPO/sed0.txt -> ../common/sed0.txt
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 mikaelkjaerulff staff 18 Jun 17 20:01 Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/IMPO/sed0.txt
> cat -v "Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/OneDrive.noindex/OneDrive/Gravhund/GravDB/ETL/IMPO/sed0.txt"
../common/sed0.txt
I do understand that it often makes little to no sense synchronizing symbolic links to a remote location as-is – they will often point to an invalid location. But if the symlink is relative (like above), then it might work (if the remote filesystem supports the concept of symbolic links). The real annoyance is that if you do a fresh download from the OneDrive cloud the symlinks are “lost” – which is the case when you do a reset of OneDrive. The symlinks are restored as normal files with the content of the symlink. As far as I can tell there is no easy way to find just these files and convert them back to symlinks.
(2)
Apple’s APFS file system encodes file and directory names using Unicode but is not a “normalizing file system”. I assume the secondary OneDrive copy does some normalization (from NFC to NFD) of file and directory names before uploading to the cloud. At least that is the only explanation I can come up with.
Ref on APFS and normal forms:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode\_equivalence#Normal\_forms
- https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/08/explainer-unicode-normalization-and-apfs/
- https://gist.github.com/JamesChevalier/8448512
- https://medium.com/@sthadewald/the-utf-8-hell-of-mac-osx-feef5ea42407
(3)
I don’t understand why emacs backup files are not copied to the secondary and subsequently uploaded to the cloud. I have a suspicion it could be due to the way emacs create the backup file. Nevertheless, OneDrive does not pick up the emacs backup files – this must be a bug in OneDrive.
I could understand if OneDrive has the need for a temporary location (to normalize for example) for files and directories before being uploaded to the cloud – but with emphasis on “temporary”. The secondary copies live forever – that can’t be right.
As a side note: Still OneDrive goes to 100+ % CPU for a minute or so every time I save a file in my OneDrive location. At least the newest version of OneDrive does not cause kernel panics anymore (fingers crossed, knock on wood…).
What – if anything – can I do to avoid having the secondary copies?
/Mikael
Microsoft 365 and Office | OneDrive | For home | MacOS
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.
45 answers
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Anonymous
2023-02-08T17:15:12+00:00 -
Anonymous
2022-12-22T17:49:39+00:00 I appreciate all the comments. I have both an M1 Mac Mini and Intel 2019 MacBook Pro 16. Both experience the duplicate files. After much angst, I dropped OneDrive reluctantly when it began gobbling up space with duplicate files. It sync'd fast and kept a local copy which was great but the duplicates were eating space too quickly. I switched to iCloud drive which worked very smoothly. There is one snag though.
iCloud tries to move files to the cloud and will take them off the mac. I learned this from an Apple Tech Supervisor when we were discussing another iCloud problem. In practice, this isn't a problem as long as there is a solid internet connection but not very helpful on an airplane trip when a file is not available.
I want a cloud copy and a local copy sync'd across at least two macs. Thought iCloud was the solution but appears only a partial fix. Dropbox supposedly has this feature but I haven't had the energy to go through another transition. Syncing takes days.
If someone has found a better option, would love to hear it.
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Anonymous
2022-12-07T00:09:34+00:00 Hi there,
I'm just a run of the mill longtime mac user. I don't know if you have solved the issue you have so clearly explained.
I ran into this egregious folder, namely UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite, while trying to find out what was eating my disk space.
I found the following explanation which I think may clear up the issues raised in this thread: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/one-drive-looks-like-it-is-taking-up-double-the/e016de1c-c536-4436-8d9e-ff37b8cf9325 Please forgive me if I've missed your point.
In any case, I ran a "disk space" utility (CleanMyMac) that reported a tiny size for the folder, confirming the claims in the latter post.As it happens, I did find the culprit that was bloating my drive, 494 GB of it (!!!), a folder called "coreMLCache", presumably the result of some machine learning functions for which I have not yet found any info in the web... I put it in an external drive, erased it from my mac and, as yet, I'm doing fine, having recovered half my disk...
Cheers!
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Anonymous
2022-09-29T19:14:42+00:00 This is unexpected.
In my case, the cache location did only hold "stubs" of the files, that do not really use up space.
You can check this with "du -ks *" on you folders in both locations.
But the, this is different for my, as I download all files to the external disk and the internal disk is too small to hold everything.
Still interesting!
Maybe you could test this (of course your pathes):
- sync location, but the hidden folder ".ODContainer-OneDrive" parallel to your chosen OneDrive folder
tja@mini:~$ cd /Volumes/XTRMQ/OneDrive_TB1/.ODContainer-OneDrive/OneDrive
tja@mini:/Volumes/XTRMQ/OneDrive_TB1/.ODContainer-OneDrive/OneDrive$ du -ks * | sort -n
- cache location
tja@mini:~$ cd /Users/tja/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal
tja@mini:~/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal$ du -ks * | sort -n
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Anonymous
2022-09-29T19:06:48+00:00 Again, one is only a cache!
The bulk of files should not consume data.
You can check with "du -ks *" on the folder.
I see drastic differences between the sync and the cache location!
But still, OneDrive uses this cache and probably even read and writes everything two times - even if you onlu use one disk!
This is a horrible construct!