Onedrive and external drives

Question

Onedrive and external drives

Cory Jensen 0

Can onedrive connect and sync to external drives on a mac?

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4 answers

Your answer

Answer 1

Yes. OneDrive on Mac can be stored on an external drive, and external drives are fully supported.

Key limits and requirements:

For changing OneDrive storage to external storage, the drive must be non-ejectable.
Removable USB drives are not supported.
On Mac, the external drive should be formatted as APFS.
Folder Protection cannot be set up with OneDrive on external memory.

If moving an existing OneDrive location to an external drive on Mac:

Select the OneDrive cloud icon in the menu bar.
Select Help & Settings > Preferences.
Go to the Account tab.
Select Unlink this Mac.
Run OneDrive setup again and choose the new file location on the external drive.

If local disk space is the concern, Files On-Demand is also available on Mac.

Answer 2

SD - IA 180.5K Independent Advisor

Hi,

Yes, but with a few caveats, and you configure OD on an external drive during installation.:

The external drive should generally use a Mac-compatible filesystem such as APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled). NTFS is not suitable for a normal OneDrive sync location on macOS.
You generally cannot tell OneDrive to independently sync arbitrary folders anywhere on an external drive while keeping the OneDrive folder elsewhere. The supported approach is to place the OneDrive folder itself on the external drive.

I hope this information helps. If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to reach out. Wishing you good luck!

Cory Jensen 0 Reputation points

2026-10-05T11:30:08.0666667+00:00

The problem I'm running into is that it is an ejectable external USB drive. Even though I have no plans to ever eject it, I can't set it to be "non-ejectable."

Answer 3

SD - IA 180.5K Independent Advisor

Thank you Cory. I appreciate the details. I think there is some confusion, can you share a screenshot of the error message?

Cory Jensen 0 Reputation points

2026-10-05T15:01:31.0333333+00:00

I'm not getting an error message. I initially tried to set up to sync onedrive with a 4tb external hard drive (3.5" in an enclosure) and directed the sync folder to that drive. When the set up completed and it started syncing it put a shortcut/alias in the external drive that linked to the actual sync folder it created on my main drive in the "cloudstorage" folder.

I tried to unlink it and set it up a few times with the same outcome each time. Now I have it set up to sync directly to the cloudstorage folder since that is what is does anyway.

In the research I've done, it seems like there isn't a solution but I thought I might get lucky here. If not, I may end up abandoning onedrive and switching to dropbox. I've heard it can sync to external drives.

Answer 4

Thank you. I have also dug more on the issue, and see that Microsoft does say that external drives can be supported, but the distinction is that the external volume must be considered non-ejectable. Microsoft specifically documents APFS for Mac and says removable USB drives aren't supported.

Also, Dropbox's current documentation says that storing the Dropbox folder on an external drive is no longer supported on macOS 12.5 and later. The newer Dropbox implementation uses a secure location on the Mac's local drive, with files online-only by default.

I hope this information helps. If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to reach out. Wishing you good luck!