Will Microsoft OneDrive keep me from running out of C: drive space?

Factual Questions
1

My corporate PC has less than 10% of the C: drive free and I don’t want to run out of space and have a malfunction. But all my user files are set up with Microsoft OneDrive. If I ignore the free space numbers and keep on working, will it automatically free up space locally so I never have to worry?

Right now I have about 34 GB space available and will have a couple 9 GB files to save this week, for example.

I have selected “Always keep on this device” for a small share of my existing folder structure. I could also select “Free up space” for some upper-level folders I anticipate not accessing soon, if that would help.

Thanks!!

2

I’m believe that most companies (no idea in your particular case) have their OneDrive ecosystem set up to stay in sync with a local drive on the user’s machine. If so, you might still run into issues.

With that said, if you have a need to regularly store 9 GB files for work, your infrastructure team should be providing you with a better storage solution anyway.

3

Check out Storage Sense, which is an option in OneDrive that will automatically remove local files that you haven’t used in a while.

4

Yeah, generally speaking anything that would be of any real corporate importance should be stored on some sort of network share that’s backed up. Ideally that share would reside on a SAN or NAS, and not just a drive on a server.

In my experience in OneDrive, there are two basic ways you can use it; you can set it up to be a mirroring sort of thing for specific directories, and you can just use it like another drive- add directories, etc… The latter is more than likely what you want to do if drive space is at a premium. Also, since it’s a Microsoft cloud computing service, that storage will be redundant, etc… so safe from most mayhem.

5

OneDrive as has been mentioned, can be configured to mostly store your data in the cloud in which case it won’t utilize local drive space except in an on-demand sense. I think it defaults to doing a lot of “mirroring” though as its standard behavior, which will use up lots of local drive space. If your organization has it configured a certain way, you may not be able to alter that configuration on an enterprise setup.