Forum Discussion
Storage full on PC filled with Sharepoint files
mrbellybell Hello,
I believe that this is happening because of OneDrive sync, from SharePoint Online to your local machine.
If you are using Windows 10, please look at the bottom right corner of your taskbar and see if you can find the OneDrive logo. Right click on it and select settings. On the tab "Account", you should be able to see how much data you have synced and be able to disable the sync.
Yours sincerely,
Aref Halmstrand
mrbellybell Hi - this functionality exists in the OneDrive sync client, it's called 'Files on Demand'. What is does is keep a 'ghost' copy of the file on your local machine and syncs it with the SharePoint version. Until you open the file it will not be downloaded.
To activate it:
- Click the OneDrive cloud icon in the taskbar
- Go to 'Help & Settings' > 'Settings'
- On the 'Settings' tab of the box that appears, ensure the tickbox 'Files on demand' is ticked
- Done!
If you want to remove files that have downloaded to your PC, open the location in File Explorer, right click on the file/folder you wish to remove and choose 'Free up space'. This will remove the file back to your SharePoint location whilst keeping the ghost copy on your device.
Check out this link for more info https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/save-disk-space-with-onedrive-files-on-demand-for-windows-10-0e6860d3-d9f3-4971-b321-7092438fb38e#:~:text=Turn%20on%20Files%20On-Demand%201%20Make%20sure%20you%E2%80%99re,and%20download%20files%20as%20you%20use%20them%20box.
Why do microsoft call it a shortcut when it takes up disk space? A shortcut is 1k but a sharepoint shortcut can be hundreds of GBs.... its bizarre
It will take up your disk space, only if you are downloading local copies of all files in library. If your sync is setup with 'Files on demand' feature turned on, it will not take much space in your local disk.
Bharath Arja
Shortcuts "Add shortcut to OneDrive" is an extremely strange concept, if you dont open any files then the pc stores nothing, but as soon as you open a file, it is stored locally on the pc, After opening several hundred large files, the users subsequently needs to manually use "Free up space" - but this concept isnt clearly communicated. Even worse if they Open a read only file - they cant remove it and the Onedrive client gets really confused and gets stuck in a loop.
Previously a shortcut to a network mapped drive didnt store local copies on the pc (in fact it was only 1KB in size, but in sharepoint it does as local copies of files are downloaded, when files are opened from the shortcut! this is causing major problems for users as they are running out of disk space quickly.
I can only guess the developers had unlimited disk space and were clueless of the consequences that they had created.
