You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.
💡 Did you know?
⏺ If you can't accept iCloud Terms and Conditions... Learn more >
⏺ If you don't see your iCloud notes in the Notes app... Learn more >
⏺ If you can't accept iCloud Terms and Conditions... Learn more >
⏺ If you don't see your iCloud notes in the Notes app... Learn more >
I initiated a mass download of files from my iCloud account to my computer, regretfully. I would like to stop the files from downloading to my computer and put them back into the iCloud. How?
Mac mini (M2, 2023)
Your files are still on iCloud, but they are now being synced with your local Mac. To disable this setting:
Read more at Change which apps sync and store data with iCloud - Apple Support
Your files are still on iCloud, but they are now being synced with your local Mac. To disable this setting:
Read more at Change which apps sync and store data with iCloud - Apple Support
You shouldn’t need to throw anything into the trash. Move everything you want to be stored into iCloud in your iCloud Drive folder in Finder and then right click and select "Remove Download" for any files you want only stored on iCloud and not locally. Hope this helps!
Thank you muguy for your clarification. I am grateful to you and ekassos.
How then can I tell it to offload as needed to free up space? It’s not doing that now… I have about 1 kb of space left on the computer.
Dave McA
I see. Not exactly sure exactly what the issue is here, as simply downloading the files from iCloud to your local iCloud Drive folder (usually found in ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs) should not delete them from online storage.
The only thing that comes to mind is if you moved files from your iCloud Drive folder to a non-iCloud synced folder. Then you would have been presented with the following prompt:
If that's the case, moving the files back to their original location and letting iCloud downloads/uploads finish should restore everything as it was before you began downloading the files. If the files you moved remain downloaded on your local iCloud Drive folder and you want to free up some storage on your Mac, you can always right click and select "Remove Download".
Hope this is what's actually going on and you can sort this out shortly. Otherwise, if you can provide some more context on how you initiated the download operation, we can troubleshoot further. Good luck!
How do I delete downloads that were saved?
How do I delete downloads
Thank you very kindly ekassos for responding to my question.
When I initiated the downloading from the iCloud, a warning indicated that the files would be removed from the iCloud, and indeed the space taken in iCloud has diminished accordingly.
Also, I want to restart the normal process of backing up my files from the computer to the iCloud. Turning off the sync would not do that.
In other words I would like everything to be as it was before I recklessly began the downloading.
ekassos, You were exactly correct, and I was mistaken about the removal of the files from the iCloud that I thought was occurring, and thank you again for your careful responses.
So now I have a lot of files on my computer that I want to remove from it, and just rely on the iCloud versions. As you can see, I'm no expert, and I'm afraid that if I throw them into the trash then they really will be removed from the iCloud back up.
What's worse is that my computer storage is full, since I downloaded so many files from the cloud to it. I'm not sure on how to remove the duplication of files in the two locations. Can I just delete the files from my computer and, as I said above, rely on the iCloud versions?
Can you advise me?
Many thanks again.
ekassos, If you are patient enough to provide still more gfraet help, I think I can better clarify the problem I'm having.
I have a desktop folder which is an alias to the photo files on the iCloud Drive. It was in this folder that I clicked "download", and the photo files then were copied to my computer. In this folder the paths of the files still lead back to the iCloud.
But my computer's drive is filling up with downloaded files. I don't know where to find them to delete them from the computer, or how to go about finding them -- they are not the ones kin that desktop folder, since they are the files in the iCloud.
Thank you for any further comments.
Dave McA
Anything in iCloud is also on your computer. iCloud is a synchronization service, not offline storage. If you elect to optimize storage then some files may offload to iCloud only should space become necessary on your device. If you also elect to sync desktop and documents, the same applies to those folders.
How can I stop downloading files to my computer from iCloud?
