Explore strategies to free up OneDrive space while understanding how it takes up space. Discover effective ways to optimize storage usage for improved productivity and organization.
OneDrive, developed by Microsoft, has been one of the most popular cloud service. Many users choose to store their files in https://onedrive.live.com/ and some of them even install the OneDrive desktop app on their computer, so that they can access cloud files on the local drive. However, there comes the question, "does OneDrive take up space on the local hard drive".Yes, OneDrive does take up space on your device.
Although OneDrive indeed occupies local disk drive, but the amount varies depending on several factors, mainly the size and number of files you sync. For instance, if you have a large collection of high-resolution photos or videos stored in OneDrive, it will occupy more space on your device compared to a smaller collection of text documents.
Besides, the amount of OneDrive consume is also decided by how many files are offline available (you can directly access them even there is not any available internect connection). If you mark all files and folders as "Always keep on this device," then the amount will be quite huge. If you just make a small number of files offline available, then the amount will be decreased a lot.
To free up space on OneDrive on your computer, you can try the following methods:
You can regularly review your files stored in your OneDrive folder and delete files or folders that you no longer need and delete them to reclaim space.
The "Files On-Demand" feature in OneDrive allows you to access files in your OneDrive without downloading them to your computer, thus saving space. Contrary to “Always keep on this device”, this feature makes files online without occupying local disk space. Just download them to local when you need.
Check your OneDrive sync settings and make sure you just sync essential files and folders to your computer. You can customize which folders are synced by right-clicking on the OneDrive icon in the system tray, selecting "Settings," going to the "Account" tab, and clicking "Choose folders" to select the folders you want to sync.
Consider moving large or infrequently accessed files to an external storage device, such as an external hard drive. This will free up space on your computer while still keeping the files accessible when needed. Or you can transfer them to another cloud with enough available storage space. Thus, you might need the help of MultCloud. It aims to transfer, back up, sync data from one cloud to another cloud without going through the local storage, an obvious advantage over manually downloading from one cloud and then re-uploading to another.
Compressing large files in OneDrive to reduce their size is also an effective way to save space. Right-click on the file, select "Send to," and then choose "Compressed (zipped) folder" to create a compressed version of the file.
So, does OneDrive take up spac? Of course, it does occupy your local disk space. However, the amount space of OneDrive consume is not fixed, but varies in different cases. If you find the OneDrive eats up too much space of your local hard drive and have affected the system performance, you can adopt the above methods to free up space to make sure your system run smoothly.