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
This is a basic settings while we configure/sync one drive for business. When you sync one drive that time you can choose another drive instead of C:\ drive.
One drive is a cloud storage but when you sync it on your system it will consume local storage but there is option that you mention which files you don't need to sync.
Hope this will help, if still you have any query than please let us know. We are here to help
IT_Expert_Guru WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF ONE DRIVE IF IT IS TAKING UP LOCAL SPACE ON MY F*CKING COMPUTER. ARE YOU PEOPLE SERIOUS?
- So I i'm paying for 1T of cloud storage .well let me transfer 50 gigs of images/avi files.....wait a min.... I dont have what? enough memory(WTF) on my C; drive...this is the part you keep quiet about knowing anything about computers....
explain this to anyone who knows how to thinkjacqueswilliam You don't buy a copier to save paper. You don't use OneDrive to save storage. You don't use OneDrive to share what should not be shared.
1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage makes it easy to replicate copies of your files between devices. It can be convenient not to have to manually copy files between computers. (For example, my Steam game files are in sync between 2 of my computers via a Steam service. I can play on either computer without losing my place in the game. Game save files are small, so it works well.) OneDrive is not so great for those that have very large files. That 500 GB file can be on your local drive on the disk in the "real" location and in the cache. A copy is also in the cloud. If the file is deleted, it's still in the cloud and can be undeleted. (This saved me in my first attempts to regain control of my files.) And copies can be on any other device you use that has OneDrive enabled.
What scares me a little is my remote logins to servers. What if someday something happens and OneDrive wants to sync something that will do damage to the server. Oh, my experimental PowerShell profile magically is being used on a server...how convenient of it to load that experimental module and use it for maintenance on a production server. For developers, I wonder if Visual Studio files can be shared that are specific to that instance of the IDE setup. I would think it would be a nightmare for a TFS workspace. (I use only one machine for development, so I would not know.) Do you trust OneDrive to know what to sync and not sync?
Because I have no interest in understanding OneDrive internals or in becoming an expert OneDrive administrator, I uninstalled it. Problem solved. Life is better now. I do like the idea of having computers in sync so that I can work on either. I don't like the idea of having them in sync and not being able to work on either.
- PS I ran out of space because of my initial misunderstanding of OneDrive. My PowerShell scripts also starting failing because OneDrive changed the environment paths to use OneDrive directories. It was very confusing to sort out. I lost days of productivity.
Michael_B2325 Yes, they are serious. Think of One Drive as replication, not an extra drive. Replication requires overhead, takes space to cache, and can be slow. I made the mistake of using one drive thinking that I could save some space. I needed a few 100 GB, so I tried to moved 300 GB of seldom used hyper-v virtual machines to one-drive. However, this caused another 300 GB of local use to store a copy in cache. I had to spend a lot of time to reverse that before I could get back to work. It's very risky to undo because a simple delete deletes it everywhere. (There is a place to get back deleted files in the cloud, fortunately.) If I want to be confused and risk losing something, I will use OneDrive. It was also really annoying when OneDrive silently replaced some of my local PowerShell directories with OneDrive directories. I spend a bit of time figuring out how to disable OneDrive. It can be uninstalled. (It's been a while since I did this.)
If you need more drive space, I think it is possible to trick trick OneDrive into keeping something without having a local copy. I think it's annoying to do. It think it's safer and easier to get a real drive (either locally or in cloud) and avoid OneDrive. OneDrive might be fine for some, but it's too intrusive/mysterious for me. I use the free veeam agent for windows for backup, so I really don't need the extra "safety."
