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
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?
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."