OneDrive issues using external drive & downloading all files.

[philnumbers]

Hello I hope someone can help me get this sorted.

I'm in the process of moving from Windows to a Mac mini M1, it was all going well but I've run in to a problem with OneDrive.

What I want to do is have a complete local copy of my OneDrive (approx 350GB) so have plugged in a 1TB SSD via USB C.

I've installed OneDrive and set the location to the external drive. I've read about the hidden .ODContainer folder, which started to populate with my files. I tried copying everything straight to that folder, but it didn't work so I deleted that and started again. This time I set OneDrive off downloading in its entirety, which appeared to be going well until the internal drive filled up.

I thought what should happen is the .ODContainer folder is where all my files should be stored and the internal drive won't fill up. Have I misunderstood how this works? The .ODContainer folder did also grow, so effectively I've ended up with 2 local copies of my files. And a full internal drive.

Cheers for any help

 

[Ben J.]

I never used OneDrive, but I've used iCloudDrive and I'm currently on GoogleDrive, and they both use this folder to reflect movements of files to cloud storage:
~/Library/CloudStorage/
(This is your user library folder, not the top level one.)

Any time I upload files to the googledrive, it gets copied here too. I can manually delete them to retrieve disk space, and the files will still reside in googledrive online. Files and folders that are not synced with the cloud storage get a little cloud sign with a down-arrow. You can click the symbol to sync the two, and the symbol will disappear.

This is the simple functionality that manages cloud storage like this in macOS. F.ex if you enable 'Desktop and documents' in icloud system settings, the Documents folder will seem to disappear from your drive, but it's simply relocated to "iCloudDrive" inside this CloudStorage folder. All to let you have access whether you're online or not.

My guess is this is where your drive is filling up. But as I said, You can safely delete the folders here, if you're happy that they're safe in the cloud.

IHTH.

 

[philnumbers]

Thanks Ben. I'll give that a try later and see if it behaves that way. It's a bit unnerving deleting things before fully understanding things incase it actually deletes from the cloud as well (I do have a backup...!)

I've done some reading and it *seems* like Google Drive still works happily on an external drive using the Mirroring option so I'm going to have a play with that too and see if that works better.