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I recently needed to free up some space on my Dell Venue 8 Pro, running Windows 8.1, and realized that I had OneDrive set for all files to be available offline, meaning it was caching local copies of all files. No problem, I thought. I'll just change it globally to make the files available as online-only. I've read that the files then do not consume space locally. Instead, there are place holder shortcuts which allow browsing of the file structure, and files are only downloaded when accessed or marked to be available offline.

However, after changing the global OneDrive setting for all files to be online-only, the local files continue to consume their full space (13 GB). I cannot delete the files as they are then deleted in the cloud. I would have expected that after marking all the files as online-only, the bits would start deleting, or perhaps after some definable period of time of not being accessed. Or at least have a button to manually flush the local OneDrive file cache. Alas, 'tis not so. How can I clear the local OneDrive file cache for online only files?

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  • possible duplicate of How to reset SkyDrive/OneDrive sync?
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Oct 19, 2014 at 15:13
  • I have searched for this for hours but didn't see that post. They do seem to have addressed the essence of the question, although I am not necessarily trying to reset the sync process as they are asking for unless that is what needed to be done. However, I have previously found the suggestions offered there and they have not cleared the cache. In other words, after running the OneDrive troubleshooter and also running the commands to shutdown, reset, and start SkyDrive, the 13GB of files are still there. Should I use the SkyDrive shutdown command, manually delete the files, then restart?
    – Steve Evans
    Oct 19, 2014 at 18:06
  • Are you sure they're taking up space? Are you looking at the Size or the Size on disk property?
    – Vinayak
    Mar 12, 2015 at 20:18

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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+100

If you have set your files to online-only, you are probably being tricked by the new and wonderful cloud integration of Windows 8.

From the Microsoft article Online-only files and files available offline :

Online-only files, also called smart files, are a special kind of OneDrive file in Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1. You can browse them on your PC, but the file contents are really in OneDrive, so they don’t take up much of your disk space. Online-only files look like normal files on your PC, they have all the typical file info (like date modified, file type, and size), and you can search them. When you open online-only files from File Explorer and most apps, the file contents are downloaded automatically.

This wonderful transparency assumes that one has continuous Internet connectivity. Imagine getting on a plane and suddenly discovering that those files thought to be on the PC are, in fact, not there. Only the "smart" placeholders are there, and stupidly enough can't be opened while offline.

In my book, this new system is utterly and absolutely broken and user-unfriendly. Until it is fixed, you might be better off using another free online service which is not as well integrated into Windows.

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  • 1
    Yes, I am being tricked. I used SpaceMonger to analyze disk usage (I've been using the same version for a few years; it's older than OneDrive). It looks like that app must be using 'Size' instead of 'Size on disk' to report with. Indeed, my SkyDrive folder is size 98Gb, size on disk 366Mb.
    – Scott Langham
    Mar 13, 2015 at 17:26

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