My Documents and Downloads are empty, but I don't have much storage left, why?

Question

My Documents and Downloads are empty, but I don't have much storage left, why?

LisaG 20

Hello!

I hope someone can please help.

I was running out of space on my hard drive so cleared out My Documents and Downloads, but realised I still have very little storage space left.

Please see attachments x3.

I'm clearly having a thick moment and have not been using OneDrive for long, but I thought Window C drive was a hard drive and OneDrive cloud storage... why is that OneDrive (cloud) is taking up all the space on my Windows C drive (hard drive)?

Storage.png

Storage 2.png

Storage 3.png

Thanks,

Lisa.

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Answer 1

Rodrigo Queiroz 78,730 Independent Advisor

Hi, I'm Rodrigo and I will help you.
OneDrive is a cloud storage service, it can sync your files locally and store then on your local storage for faster and offline access.
You can remove the OneDrive local files by right-clicking the files/folder and select "Free up space" this will remove the local copy of the file and only keep it in the cloud.
You can select many files/folders to do it in a batch

The local synced files show the green checkmark and the cloud only files show the cloud icon.

LisaG 20 Reputation points

2025-09-02T14:35:12.9266667+00:00

Hi Rodrigo,

How simple!

I still don't fully get why I would get cloud storage only for the default to be that the files are also stored locally, kind of defeats the point of having the cloud storage to me! It's like it's being saved twice.

I've freed up quite a bit of space so that the files are now only on the cloud, but if I click on files in the cloud how do I prevent these files being synced and stored locally again? Or would I have to keep freeing them up as I go?

Thanks,

Lisa.