I have recently been doing some work for a customer who has introduced OneDrive to their estate. For reasons known only to them, they have insisted that their users have their OneDrive storage restricted to only 1GB. Not much in today’s money.
The issue that I have been seeing (on more than one occasion) is that OneDrive would run out of space (denoted by a red cross over the blue cloud icon) yet if you were to look at what the folder contained, clearly there should be space left. On one occasion there should have been as much as 700MB left so I was left scratching my head as to why it was complaining it was full.
This is what has worked for me when I have come across the above scenario, and mainly involves removing the versioning feature, which by default will store 500 major versions.
Right-click OneDrive icon and select View Online.
Select Recycle Bin from the menu on the left. Click Empty Recycle Bin. This can take a little while sometimes, be patient and ensure it’s properly emptied.
Once empty you should see a line at the bottom of the screen: Can’t find what you’re looking for? Check the Second-stage recycle bin. Click the Second stage recycle bin link.
Delete everything in the second-stage recycle bin.
Click the cog/gear icon in the top right of OneDrive. A setting menu should open. Select Site Settings.
Under Site Settings | Site Administration click Site libraries and lists.
Under Create a version each time you edit a file in this document library? select No versioning.
Get the user to log back on and restore the user’s desktop and favourites.
Reinstall OneDrive. Once configured, copy user data back to the user’s local OneDrive directory and wait to sync.
The above steps were successful in releasing the ‘used’ space. Bare in mind, no version history will be kept in this scenario so please ensure that this is acceptable first. Without step 12, I did see the problem come back in one instance so if possible, I’d strongly recommend this step. You must bare in mind that when this procedure is carried out, it is like the user logging on for the first time and any customisations to their local profile WILL BE LOST.