How do I free up space in my local OneDrive folder when I have a number of files and subfolders marked "Always keep on this device" and I wish to keep them that way?

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How do I free up space in my local OneDrive folder when I have a number of files and subfolders marked "Always keep on this device" and I wish to keep them that way?

Anonymous

I have a problem.

I have been using OneDrive for a number of years and have several hundred gigabytes of stuff in my OneDrive repository. At least 300GB of subfolders and some individual files within my local OneDrive folder are marked "Always keep on this device". This is intentional, and I need to keep it that way because I need to access those files and folders without any delay.

Occasionally, I do a clean-up by using the "Free up space" feature. I haven't done it for a while, but the way that I recall it working up until I-don't-know-when was that I would click "Free up space" on the top level folder, and OneDrive would then diligently remove the local copy of any files and folders that are not marked "Always keep on this device". It would retain the local copy of any files/folders that were marked as such.

So, today I went ahead and did the same thing that I thought I always did. However, this time OneDrive has removed the local copy of the entire repository and disabled the "Always keep on this device" flag on ALL of my files. I now have to try to remember which of the hundreds of files and folders I need to keep locally and re-enable the "Always keep" flag on them, and then re-download them all. If I wanted to remove the "Always keep" flag from a folder, then I would have specifically unchecked it myself - otherwise, I would expect "Always keep" to... well... always keep!

Can someone confirm that the way I described the previous operation of the "Free up space" feature was indeed the way it worked (and thus I'm not prematurely senile), and,
How can I perform a clean up of my OneDrive folder that removes local copies of files and folders that are not marked "Always keep on this device", retaining the local copies on any files/folders that are marked as such?

Manually traversing all of my 6,000+ folders and 112,000+ files to selectively free up space is not going to make me very happy. At all. Especially after having to manually traverse same in order to re-enable the "Always Keep" flag as I am now in the process of doing. Hence, I really hope that there is a way to do this which I have either forgotten about or which is a recent change to Onedrive.

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Answer 1

Hi, I'm Diane and I'm happy to help you today.

In my experience, freeing up space turned off the keep on my device setting and applied the change to all files and subfolders in that folder. The OneDrive app "frees up space" automatically after a period of time passes without using a file not marked 'keep on my device'.
OneDrive should do that automatically. I tend to keep all the files I want to keep on the device in one folder path and if I need to free up space, I do it on other folders. Check your storage sense settings in Windows Settings. Start typing storage on the start menu and open storage settings to see if it is enabled.

Microsoft's article on storage sense: https://support.microsoft.com/office/use-onedrive-and-storage-sense-in-windows-10-to-manage-disk-space-de5faa9a-6108-4be1-87a6-d90688d08a48

The settings are grayed out because I'm running it now to verify it's not removing items marked to keep on my computer. you can control the settings for OneDrive and iCloud but not other cloud services (like dropbox).

Let me know how it goes, I'm here to help you further if needed.

-- Diane

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How do I free up space in my local OneDrive folder when I have a number of files and subfolders marked "Always keep on this device" and I wish to keep them that way?

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