iCloud Drive and Documents both taking up space on my local Mac HD

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Level 1

4 points

iCloud Drive and Documents both taking up space on my local Mac HD

I have 2TB iCloud drive. I have the desktop and docs set up.

Why is it that when I open the storage manager it tells me that BOTH the cloud and documents folder are counting against my HD storage? This is redundant. Both the documents folder and drive are mirrors of each other.

I had assumed that only the currently downloaded files from drive would count against my local hard drive space. What is the point in using icloud apart from offsite storage? It does not save me any space at all, it doubles it! What am I missing here?

Also, I have no interest in the optimize feature unless it is necessary. I prefer to have complete control of what files i keep downloaded and not downloaded locally.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.4

Posted on Jan 21, 2025 3:35 PM

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Answer 1

Tunadadamaja Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 22, 2025 8:26 AM in response to muguy

No, I understand that I cannot access any iCloud files without downloading to my local HD. That's obvious. My question is why does the undownloaded files count towards my local HD space?

To be clear, I misspoke and they do not count twice. I currently have roughly 450GB of total data on my iCloud Drive, all of which are counting against my HD capacity, even though I have removed the download of 230GB worth.

They way I thought it worked (and the way it logically should) is if I remove the download of a 1GB file in my synced documents folder, it will remove the file locally and free up that 1GB of space.

Can someone explain to me in detail what I am missing? Does opting out of the "optimize" option not allow the functionality of selecting what is locally downloaded and what is not? I would prefer NOT to have that selection automatically chosen based on recency.

My ultimate aim: I have roughly 1.5 TB of files that I would like to get uploaded to iCloud Drive so I can have random access to all 1.5 TB with only a 1 TB internal HD. I would keep around 50% of it undownloaded at any given time.

Thanks

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Answer 2

muguy

Level 10

84,121 points

Jan 21, 2025 4:04 PM in response to Tunadadamaja

Anything in iCloud is also on your device. If you elect to optimize then files may be offloaded to iCloud only only if space is needed on your device. iCloud is primarily a synchronization service, not offline storage.

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Answer 3

Tunadadamaja Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 22, 2025 8:37 AM in response to Tunadadamaja

I also have about 3.5 TB of media that I have stored on my home media server. I would be willing to upgrade iCloud to the 6TB option if it were possible to keep a redundant copy of that as well.

I prefer to stay in the Apple ecosystem but it just seems like I might need to opt for a different, more customizable cloud service. iCloud seems very limiting to me.

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