Fixing OneDrive annoyance with Rstudio on Windows
By default, Rstudio on Windows with OneDrive installed stores packages in the OneDrive documents folder. This package location causes a lot of issues:
- It causes a lot of upload to OneDrive
- It can cause conflicts between machines (since they will be storing to the same OneDrive folder)
- It can cause unnecessary delays in having to download files from OneDrive (if they are not locally cached)
All in all, this location seems to be a poor side-effect of making OneDrive the default storage location on Windows. It can be easily rectified. Simply create a file called .Renvironment in “C:\Users\<username>\OneDrive\Documents” (AKA your OneDrive documents folder) with the following line:
R_USER="C:/User/<username>"
This one line redefines the user-specific directory to be on the local disk, in C:\Users\<username>. This is the exact same place as the %USERPROFILE% environment variable on Windows. The site-wide .Rprofile will make use of this variable and create an package path using it as a base.
These mechanisms are explained here, and it is simpler than editing the site-wide .Rprofile as described here (and many other places), which would require you to repeat the procedure on new installations (and also requires modifying files in the base installation path).