Updates to Files On-Demand on macOS

Rick_Baumhauer  Now you've got me. I'm not really sure. The system disk currently has about 245 GB on it, which is mostly the OS and whatever is in my ~/Library - about 100 GB worth. Add to that my Documents folder on the external drive (the internal one is empty) adds about 98 GB - together that would all total 71% usage on the internal drive. That's about 20% more than the ~50% I was seeing on my old Mac (same size internal drive) running Big Sur, but not as much as the nearly 90% I was seeing at first. But that may have been before installing the latest OneDrive - so it included my entire OneDrive store which was kept local on my old Mac and restored during migration. That doesn't quite add up - that's about a 40% difference between Big Sur and Ventura and can't be entirely due to the system. So my answer has to be - I don't really know for sure.

In any case, a 71% full internal drive is uncomfortably close to being full as far as I'm concerned, and more than I expected. Yes, I should have foreseen that the OS would get bigger, everything seems to get bigger. Basically, my decision was cost-driven - I could pay ~$400 more for a 1 TB internal drive from Apple vs. half that for twice the external SSD space from Best Buy. I simply had no idea that an external drive would function so differently. On every other *ix/ux system I've used it makes no difference except possibly in performance, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that external SSD is not noticeably slower than internal, possibly because of caching. I'm pleased with everything about my purchase EXCEPT for the problems with OneDrive.