Forum Discussion
"Free up space" not working MacOS
I am running OneDrive on a Mac (Catalina 10.15.3).
I have some large files that I have chosen to "Free up Space". In the Finder they have the cloud icon next to the file name indicating that they are stored in the cloud and not on my harddrive. However when I look at the storage usage for my mac those files still appear in the Mac System tool and appear to be taking up space.
How do I resolve this?
As per the screen shot below...those four files beginning with "All Mail" have all been selected to Free up Space but still appear here.
24 Replies
I have just come across this thread after the 2nd time this has happened to my computer.
So it fills me with a lot of concern!
The last time I fixed this I had to reboot and install OSX. Not a fun process.
DROPBOX NEVER HAD THIS ISSUE!!!!! (Bringing Microsoft's attention to this as I'm hoping they can fix this issue asap!!)
Hmmmmm....
So I ran into this issue this past week and think I have found a solution here in 2024 on MacOS Sonoma. I had to do everything below to get a "Free Up Space" folder to actually free up the space on my Mac hard drive.
- I removed the folder from showing up on my Mac in the OneDrive settings. You can add it back after this process, just make sure you click "Free Up Space" on the folder right away so it doesn't download everything again. This is after you have made sure the space actually was released for use on your hard drive.
- Once I removed the folder, I restarted my computer and it started updating the OneDrive sync app with the changes. It stalled a few times, but after a combo of pausing and quitting OneDrive and restarting my computer enough, it finally worked. It could take quite a while though. It took an hour or two to remove 100GB from my hard drive.
- At the end, make sure to empty your trash, which is necessary to actually removing the items from your drive. This should free up the space in the Mac storage settings menu. If it doesn't show, try restarting your computer.
Hopefully this helps! Switching from Dropbox to OneDrive has been a letdown. Dropbox was pretty rock solid in terms of syncing and folder management. I have had tons of bugs and issues with OneDrive on my Mac. We shall see if I end up keeping OneDrive at the end of this process.
- Please open the extension. See this link: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/onedrive-using-too-much-memory-on-macos-11/5d957069-d4c2-4c2d-90d8-a63c8e832177
TKruger so here is an offical Support Link from Microsoft.
If all setting are the same, open a ticket to MicrosoftI had previously relaunched Finder and it didn't add the Free Up Space command. So just now did it twice more and it worked.
I've been dealing with this BUT if you notice, while my folder is supposed to be 104Gb... it really only takes 249Mb on disk.
I BELIEVE this is due to the way that macOS handles files and space on disk. I'm not an expert, but I think we may be blaming OneDrive for no reason. It's probably working as expected.
Hi,
No I don't think it is working as expected. I can see that the Properties of the OneDrive folder shows something similar on mine, where the size of the OneDrive folder is 68GB but shows as only using 1.78GB on disk, so OneDrive thinks Files on Demand is working. However the Mac OS thinks the disk is full and won't let me open any large files. The OS isn't recognising that Files on Demand has saved space by having the files in the cloud, which defeats the whole purpose of Files on Demand...
Cheers,
Richard
- if it is a business account, why do you not open a ticket?
ronaldpoi not for me. Space on disk includes the space for files that I have selected "free up space" for.
- in my mac it's not appear that symbol (white cloud - free up space). I don't know how to make this appear :((((
ronaldpoi Hi! Thank you for your reply. I have this certanty at the past, but something went wrong with my "Other" in the disk space management - it increased day by day. As I can do a reinstall of the MacOs any time, I did it two days ago, and free up about 80Gb of my disk. And OneDrive is at the bench until I come back to rely on it.
TKruger Hi! I was wondering if there will be a fix for this. But not! My workaround, nowadays, is to keep my OneDrive on Portal Office - and don't sync with the Mac. My company is a heavy user - and OneDrive start to increase about 4 Gb / day - and just with team members updating some files in directory that I have marked with "on demand".
Hope to have a solution in a near future!
Ah I'm having the same issue here (MacOS 10.14.6 Mojave)....I keep all my large files on my Onedrive in order to save space locally, but seems there's either an issue with OneDrive or MacOS itself? The files for me appear in local "Storage" despite having the cloud icon when located in Finder, however when I click to open the file it shows that it is downloading. So maybe it is really not kept locally but just appears to take up space...? (Mac is leaving room for you to download it in the future?) TKruger
Nice work-arround, but that solution doesn't solve this issue of "Free up space"...this way I can't search the files locally because they disappear if I unselect the folder to sync.
Hope that MS solve this big bug soon.
pedroferreira I think what you'll find is that although the files appear on the list when you look at "Storage" they don't actually take up space on your computer if you've used the "Free up space" action on OneDrive.
When I used the workaround described above it didn't free up anymore space on my HD....Finder still showed the same amount available.
