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Tim Hunter's avatar
Tim Hunter
Iron Contributor
Feb 08, 2019
Solved

OneDrive taking up space on C drive

My OneDrive is taking up a lot of space on my C drive. I thought OneDrive was in the Cloud. Did I set it up wrong? Any tips or ideas on how to save space on my C drive when I am using OneDrive? Thank...
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Elsie2724's avatar
Elsie2724
Copper Contributor
Apr 23, 2021
Before reading this, I almost permanently deleted all my files from my C:\OneDrive not knowing that it would have deleted everything from my OneDrive too! OMG! My whole life would have been lost. What is the sense of having OneDrive if the files are going to be stored on you C:Drive anyway? SMH. Microsoft you need to hire American workers who use these applications on a daily basis.
  • MarkPIa's avatar
    MarkPIa
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 24, 2021

    Yeah, that sure is not the behavior you would expect from onedrive.  I do not think that Microsoft does a good job explaining how and why onedrive behaves the way it does.  I do not rely on Onedrive or my Google drive as my only source for my data.  I back up everything to a thumb drive.  But because of the amount of data I now have stored on onedrive, I only perform a full backup about every 2 months.  I guess I need to stop being lazy and set it up so it does an incremental backup. One area I found confusing is all the little status icons that can be next to each file.  Microsoft likes to add all types unnecessary bloat to Windows.  Now, when you hover over the file, a bubble will pop up telling you what the status is.  I just do not know why sometimes it says Sync pending.  Not sure some of my folders always say this.  if I right click on onedrive at the lower right hand side of my task bar, it says onedrive is all set.  Yet some of my folders and files say a sync is pending.  Very confusing.  Elsie2724 

    • Randoid's avatar
      Randoid
      Copper Contributor
      May 20, 2021
      My naïve experience with OneDrive reminds me of a favorite farside cartoon of a momma bear holding two small skulls and talking to her cubs. "Ok, one more time and it's off to bed for the both of you...'Hey, Bob. Think there are any bears in this old cave?'...'I dunno, Jim. Let's take a look.' "

      OneDrive might be more of a replication service for small amounts of data and small files. It takes cache to do this. Make a change and the file propagates to other configured locations. It's not a backup. Deleting it anywhere deletes it everywhere - so it increases the risk of a lost file. However, there is a chance you can undelete it via the web access to OneDrive. (I did that to get back my files when I tried to get out of OneDrive and thought I could delete something in one place and not affect the other.)

      DFS replication is more efficient. An enterprise is not going to double or triple the size of SANs for a DFS cache.

      My experience years ago with $2K TB SSD drive was not fun. I needed a lot of fast storage for media and building/running VMs. It was a surprise when my drive filled up. (There was the original 400GB on C, 400 GB in a cache on C, and the 400 GB in the cloud.) I can't run VMs from the cloud, so I had to keep the local copy and remove the cache. When I tried to disentangle, I lost files and time...a lot of time...trying to undo the damage. I still see OneDrive as a risk to data and productivity.

      I might be willing to use it for a small PowerShell profile. If run scripts on different machines, the same profile would be available in other location. However, linking my OneDrive to a servers is scary. So, in the end, I really wish OneDrive was not entangled with my work. I noticed that my powershell profile paths are already to the OneDrive path...without my wanting them there. I have lost control and understanding of my development environment. I'd uninstall it, but I am afraid to do so.

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