After upgrading to Monterey MS Onedrive folder got inside iCloud

Hey. I have Version 21.230.1107.0003 (Standalone). I think I will deinstall OneDrive again, delete all the data and try to install the newest version from insider preview. Can't be worse than it is now :).

WOW!!! The thoroughness of the responses is impressive! I just upgraded a mac mini M1 to Monterey and got the same the problems of the OneDrive folders being messed up that has been outlined above. I was upgrading to fix a timemachine problem which seemed to be fixed. Was easy to upgrade so I upgraded my intel based macbook pro 16 2019. It was a totally different upgrade experience with different approval screens even. The final result was NO problems with OneDrive. The intel version works exactly like before and keeps files in the same place and on the local hard drive. Looks like a messy solution for the M1 macs that I am regretting getting involved in.

Thanks for all the good homework!!

I'm having the same problem and could not find a solution so far... i need my onedrive folder back in my user-folder.

I tried reinstalling several times with clearing all traces of onedrive, installed the build from the app store, even found a website with older builds and tried an older one - no luck, onedrive immediately updates to the latest one.

Did anyone figure out how to revert / fix this issue yet?

I stand corrected, the Library/CloudStorage folder is holding 176.99 GB vs the GroupContainer OneDrive Standalone folder holding 202.38 GB.

This is very irritating as it appears to be double storage gumming up my hard drive.

I have had problems with Time Machine backups and I this makes it all suspect.

Everything is working at the moment but now I fear it could break too.

Thanks for raising the issue.

I was able to get my problem fixed--Here is what happened

I talked to a Microsoft specialist and he had not seen this problem before, he suggested reinstalling OneDrive as a solution.

Here is what I did:

1.made a copy of the files in the various OneDrive locations to an external hard drive so I have them safe.

2. Signed out of OneDrive, removed the app and Deleted ALL the OneDrive files in the many Library folder. This was a bit tedious looking for onedrive or microsoft.onedrive files. Not sure if I needed to do but did it anyway. There were lots squirreled away. Then finally took a breath and deleted the actual document files in the CloudStorage folder and the Group Container folder. There were two virtually identical sets of data. 2X the 202.3 GB of data files.

3. Installed a fresh copy of MacOS 12.1

4. Downloaded a new copy of OneDrive and set up a new OneDrive folder to sync.

4.5 Turned off Files on Demand in preferences

5. Let it download files from the OneDrive cloud and sync. I have a fast internet so it "only" took about 3.5 hours to down load 202 GB.

This process actually took less time than digging through the internet to find suggestions.

The clue was a brand new MacBook Air M1 running Monterey out of the box that sync'd with OneDrive flawlessly and didn't create the goofy files in the Library folder.

Must be a problem with the Monterey Upgrade from Big Sur and OneDrive integration…

Hope it stays fixed...and hope this may help.

Stay well

Here is the good news.

It is possible to reinstall ONLY the MacOS and keep all the files, setting etc intact without requiring the Time Machine back up. Try just reinstalling the MacOS from the recovery screen. There are two options. reinstall the MacOS and erase and reinstall. I did the the reinstall only. To get to the recovery screen, you shut down the mac and restart it plus continue to hold down the power button until the recovery screen appears. I found lots of instructions on how to do this that are better than mine if you search for "reinstalling MacOS on Apple M1 computer."

My back up was corrupted these problems so I couldn't use it. Fortunately, I have another almost identical mac and time machine backup that was good so I had insurance.

The Monterey reinstall was easy and didn't take that long (under an hour and half) and I could see that everything was working.

One thing I forgot to mention, I signed out of Microsoft on one of my Office programs to make sure everything was off before I started this adventure. Just needed to sign in again after it was done.

Everything else was persevered nicely. I have Parallels 16 running with virtual machines too and they had zero problems restarting.

I am still a little amazed it worked as smoothly as it did.

Good luck!!

Having encounter similar issues with OneDrive since the MacOS Monterey upgrade last week, I have been reading this thread with interest. I am now finding that the files that I edit and save, are sometimes not being synched to OneDrive cloud, and I get error message that file is "unavailable" when I try to open in Finder.

Fortunately, I make regular backups of my files to an external hard drive, including everything on OneDrive, so I have only have lost some recent files. While it is possible that deleting OneDrive install and reinstalling on my Mac will fix the problem, I have decided that I cannot rely on OneDrive if Microsoft cannot manage an upgrade to the MacOS any better than this. I am now researching the best alternate cloud and file synching service to work with both Mac and Windows.

Thanks for digging this up. It is beyond comprehension how a paid service can get shipped in such a state, causing ... Never mind, forgot for a second this is Microsoft I am talking about. Business as usual.

Thanks for sharing all the knowledge :)

Just updated OneDrive to 21.250.1205.0002 (standalone( (Apple silicon) (Preview) today, let's see if that changes anything.

One more thing that annoys me is that you don't get size information on the <user>/Library/CloudStorage/<my_OneDrive_folder>, so I can't really compare the on disk size with the magic shadow folder in /Users/<user>/Library/GroupContainersAlias/<some_number>.OneDriveStandaloneSuite/<my_OneDrive_folder.noindex>

Very annoying and I still think that cloud files on disk do take double the space...

We’re you able to make the changes to reinstall OneDrive that I outlined below? I found it very tedious to go through every folder in the Library folder and delete all the OneDrive files of any kind to get it clean. May have been overkill but since I did it and checked the option to keep local copies of files, everything is syncing properly.

I wanted to start from current state, so I did not remove anything, did not clean files and did not reset OneDrive!

Interestingly, the 21.250.xxx version now does NOT increase size in the GroupContainer folder anymore - yeah!!

All files I mark for local are properly downloaded in the corresponding OneDrive folder inside CloudStorage and do not take space inside the GroupContainers! So finally, files don't seem to take twice the space anymore - huge improvement! What is now needed is either OneDrive to really clean up what does not need to be there - or I'll toy around with deleting the corresponding files in GroupContainers and then resetting OneDrive... Risky...

I still don't get why the OneDrive.noindex in GroupContainers needs to exist when the structure is in the CloudStorage folder anyway. Likely a remnant of the former implementation that did not use the CloudStorage folder/API.