Forum Discussion
OneDrive taking up space on C drive
You might want to read up on it a bit. Assuming you are using recent W10 version, you can configure Files on demand: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-onedrive-files-on-demand-in-windows-0e6860d3-d9f3-4971-b321-7092438fb38e?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
Yeah, so many things bug me about Microsoft, Please don't get me started. I even received my MCSE and a few other certifications from them back in the 90's and early 2000's, and I still fight with their over bloated Windows that does not always work right. For example, my search, cortana, news, DTS, and a few other Microsoft apps always stop working at random times on all my computers. Anyway, I finally got my onedrive moved to another drive but never made a backup to a USB. I was frustrated with Microsoft again and needed a place to voice my displeasure. Thanks for the response.
Same issues here. OneDrive is garbage. Impossible to comprehend, replicates files on any drive you happen to have, and the worst part of it is that it can only sync files on the C:\ drive! So if you (like me and most others with relatively recent computers) have a limited space SSD for your C drive, then you are out of luck.
I spent a few hours on the phone with Microsoft support in the last two days, and they came up with the same answer: "Sorry Bub! That's the way we designed it". So I'm uninstalling OneDrive and buying a subscription to Google Drive.
Jeff Parker I have trouble understanding that if I want to backup some folders from my internal 😧 drive, they take up space on my C: drive? Why can't MS let us decide how to use their cloud storage? I just want some space to make a backup for some of my folders...let me take care of my own syncing...
- I think I've made the same mistake as so many others. We assume OneDrive is just another drive only located in the cloud. WRONG!!! Oh that it were so simple. Life would be good. What irks me is that MS doesn't come clean and explain what it really is in plain English and why it will help us. Instead they treat us like morons or lemmings rather. They say, forget what you are trying to do. Just do what we tell you, don't ask questions because we won't give you answers you can understand only platitudes. Just trust Big Brother. This is how Big Brother intends to rule the world.
I find OneDrive extremely confusing. But I hail from a time before GUIs when DOS was king. I learned to manage files as actual *files* located on actual physical drives in my possession. Not psuedo things that are just pointers to something somewhere. "Cloud" storage seems like a straightforward enough concept. And I've come to understand it well enough in the Google Drive incarnation. But OneDrive? Not a chance.
Windows lies. It doesn't tell you real pathnames. It keeps bundling up groups of files into "libraries" designed to confuse and obfuscate. Want to add a file to some nice, logical tree structure carefully constructed in your D:\ drive? Go for it. But then the damned thing pops up in the most unexpected places because Windows is trying to outsmart you and builds pointers to it all over the place. And heaven help you if you try to apply some sense of order by deleting any of those pointers: it's delete the actual file!
OneDrive just complicates matters further by adding another layer of redirection and obfuscation. Please don't misunderstand me: Apple is even worse. In a world where people refuse to learn basic operating system principles and demand to be spoon-fed "point-and-click" menus, software engineers really have no choice.
And so those of us who actually bothered to learn some modicum of coding and operating system protocols (even if it was Fortran, Assembler, and DOS) are stuck with huge mountains of overhead and chaos.
Fortunately memory and storage space is cheap, and I don't need a whole lot. So I'm scrapping the mass of confusion known as "cloud computing" and "sync"ing, and sticking with a trusted flash drive for file transfers, and Carbonite for a bullet-proof secure off-site backup.
tkendall1 Sorry to hear of your woes. I don't understand why any one has any trouble with OneDrive. It is a sensational product that works extremely well. You can easily store the OneDrive folders on another drive - I do this and it is well documented how it can be done. A simple Google search will show you how.
