Deleting massive amounts of files in OneDrive does not free up space

Dear Birkenhauer, John,

Good day, and I appreciate the clear explanation of your concern.

I'm truly sorry to hear that you are not seeing your OneDrive storage free up after deleting such a large amount of files, I can only imagine how confusing this must be, especially when the storage indicator does not match what you can see in your folders. Unfortunately, as a forum moderator, I do not have access to your tenant or any backend systems, so I am unable to diagnose or resolve this directly for you. My role here is limited to providing general guidance and possible steps that you or your administrator can try from your side.

From my research, OneDrive should not need an “end of week” or “end of month” storage recalculation. However, storage usage may not always update immediately, and storage changes can sometimes take 24 to 72 hours to fully reflect after large deletions, especially in OneDrive for Business / SharePoint-backed storage.

To start, could you check what you see in Storage Metrics? You can get there by:

1. Clicking the Settings icon (top right).
2. Selecting More settings.
3. Under Features and storage, clicking Storage Metrics.

This will give a clearer breakdown of what is actually consuming your storage.

Within Storage Metrics, click into Documents and check whether there is a large amount of Version History taking up your OneDrive storage. Many users have been able to free up significant space by cleaning up old versions. To do this, click the Version History button and manually delete the unwanted versions (this may take some time if you also want to keep a few previous versions of each file).

Since this is a corporate account, your organization may also have Microsoft Purview retention policies applied. When retention is in place, deleted or modified files can be preserved in a hidden Preservation Hold Library, which continues consuming storage even though the files appear deleted from your side. Similar OneDrive cases have identified the Preservation Hold Library as the reason storage did not decrease after deletion.

This is typically something only your Microsoft 365 / SharePoint admin can confirm or manage. If you would like the Preservation Hold Library removed, I would recommend reaching out to your Microsoft 365 administrator to either remove the retention policy from your OneDrive, or alternatively increase your OneDrive storage size. If you don't know who your IT administrator is, please refer to this article: How do I find my Microsoft 365 admin? - Microsoft Support 

For reference: Learn about retention for SharePoint and OneDrive | Microsoft Learn

I hope this information helps clarify the situation and provides you with a clear path forward. Should you have any further questions or need additional assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out, I'm always happy to help. Wishing you a wonderful day ahead.

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