How To Free Up Space On iCloud Drive

If your iCloud Drive space is full, then you can clear space by moving files to your local internal drive's storage or an external archive drive. Learn how to do free up space on iCloud Drive.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. If your iCloud storage is almost full let me show you how you can clear some space by moving some files from iCloud Drive. 
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We're going to look at the situation here where your iCloud storage is almost full and you want to clear some of that space off. Now, of course, you can just buy more iCloud storage. But let's say you don't want to do that. Let's say you think you've got some things on there that you don't need to have in iCloud and you'd rather just move them elsewhere. 
So, first we're going to assume that you've got optimized Mac Storage turned Off. In other words everything that you've got on iCloud Drive you've also got locally in iCloud Drive. It's syncing one-to-one. So you can find that setting in System Settings under Apple ID and then look under iCloud. You'll see Optimize Mac Storage there. So if you have that turned Off you're not just caching some of your iCloud Drive files locally, you've got all of them locally. It's syncing completely between iCloud Drive on your Mac and iCloud Drive in Apple servers. So in that case you've almost certainly got local files on your Mac storage, you've got some free space and you've also got iCloud Drive files. On iCloud Drive you've got all those iCloud Drive files again, the same ones, notice these are the same size and you've got some free space. But not much left. So the idea is that you want more free space on iCloud Drive. Of course you've got syncing going on between iCloud Drive on your Mac and iCloud Drive on the server. That's what that arrow in the middle does. So any changes you make to files in iCloud Drive will sync to the serve and vice versa. 
So now to reduce how much we're using in iCloud Drive on the server we need to reduce how much we're using on iCloud Drive locally. It is just simply a matter of moving some files from iCloud Drive locally into your local files, out of iCloud Drive. When we do that what will happen is your iCloud Drive local storage will be reduced and local files will increase the same amount. You've just moved the files around on your Mac storage. Then when iCloud Drive syncs after the move you'll find you're using less space on iCloud Drive. 
Let's look at how it works practically. So in the Finder I'm going to open a Finder window here and I'm going to look at iCloud Drive. If you don't see it here on the left you could always use Go and then iCloud Drive to get there as well. So this is everything I've got on iCloud Drive. Since I've got the Optimize Mac Storage switch turned Off everything here, anything I add to here, is going sync to this server. I want to get things out of here. So where am I going to put them? I'm going to put them in local storage. Let's open up a New Finder Window here and in this window I'm instead of iCloud going to go to my home folder. So I'm going to go to Home Folder. The Home Folder is essentially all of your local folders. So here I've got some different folders and I can move files from here into here. But I don't want to put them at the top level of the folder. I want to be neat and organized about it. I could put some things in folders like the Movies, Music, and Pictures folder. That's a good idea say if you do have some videos you want to store you may want to create a folder in the Movies Folder and put them there. 
But you also could create your own folders here. I've done so by creating a Local Documents Folder. Now you can name this folder anything you want. I just happened to have named it Local Documents. It makes sense to me. You can certainly have more than one of these with different names depending how you organize. I just created one and in there I can move files and I can have subfolders. Whatever I want to do. So in iCloud Drive here I may want to go and say go down to my documents folder. Look at some folders here and decide, oh I want to move this folder here. Now if I drop it in here you can see it is going to give me a warning that it is removing it from my iCloud Drive and that's fine. It is exactly what I want to do. Then it will move it here and now those files are stored here. They are off of iCloud Drive. Now after syncing whatever space this folder took up will now be removed from the server as well, freeing up some space. So we can move other folders, other files, whatever we want. Anything from iCloud Drive that we move to the Home Folder will remove things from the iCloud Drive storage and just put them on our local Mac Drive. 
But you don't have to store things inside of your Internal drive. You can also get an external drive. As a matter of fact this is ideal for files that you don't use very often anymore. Maybe an old project that you've completed. You don't want to delete it forever but you don't think you're going to need it anytime soon. So what you can do then is get an External Drive. You can attach this to your Mac and then do the same thing. But instead of moving from iCloud Drive to local files on the same Mac Storage drive that you've got internally to your Mac you can now move them to this external drive. When you do then you're going to save space and get more free space on Mac Storage and you're going to use some of the space, of course, on your external drive. Then after things sync you'll save that space now on the server. So this is a way to remove things from iCloud Drive and not only get space back on iCloud Drive but also get that space back on your local storage drive. You've got these older files now tucked away on an archive drive and hopefully you don't even need to have that archived drive attached to your Mac all the time. You can store it somewhere and only bring it out if you for some reason need to get access to the these old files again. 
So the way this would look instead of going to a place in my Home Folder I would simply go to the external drive. I've got one attached here and I've got some folders setup here. I can setup more folders depending upon my needs. Then I could just Drag and Drop items like from my documents folder into that external drive. Now notice when I do that I get the little green plus button there. That means it is going to make a Copy of it. If I want to move it I hold the Command Key down, you can see the Plus button goes away. Then I move it here and you can see it is going to give me the same warning saying it is removing it from iCloud Drive. But that's fine because I'm moving it here. That's exactly what I want to do to clear off some space. 
Now let's look at one last situation. That's if you have Optimize Mac Storage turned On. If this is the case chances are that  you've got a very small hard drive on your Mac and you simply can't fit all of your iCloud Drive files on your Mac's local drive. So you're using iCloud Drive as a way to store more files than you actually have space for locally. That's fine. That's exactly what optimize Mac Storage is for. In this case you've got your local iCloud Drive files and notice that is much smaller than the iCloud Drive server files. There is a portion of it, I've labeled it iCloud Only, that are files that only exist on Apple's iCloud servers. You see them locally but they are just place holder files. If you open one up it is actually going to download it on demand and then open up the file. So your local stuff is just your recently accessed files and the files that you access off it. 
So now here we definitely don't have the option to move some of those iCloud files to the Home Folder because we don't really have that much space on our local storage. We're definitely going to want to have an External Drive here. We're going to want to take files that we no longer need to access that often off of iCloud Drive, off of our Mac Storage and get them onto this external drive. So, transferring them there at first won't seem to save us very much space because presumably we're removing files we don't need that often. So these probably aren't really cached locally. Moving them means it is going to download them from iCloud Drive, store them just temporarily locally, and then move then onto the External Drive. When we do we'll save a little bit of space here on the local drive, maybe some of them were cached, and we're going to fill up part of an external drive. Then when everything syncs then we'll see the reduction, the equivalent amount that's on the external drive but now removed from iCloud Drive on the server. So in that case we save that space in our iCloud Drive Storage but perhaps only a little bit, or maybe even nothing saved locally because these are probably files that we weren't accessing very often anyway. Note because we're using Optimize Mac Storage it may take a little bit more time for things to sync and for you to see the savings.  But the end result should be that, for instance, you remove 50 GB of stuff from iCloud Drive, move it to an external drive, then you should save 50 GB of space on your iCloud Drive storage. But not necessarily 50 GB or maybe not even any space locally. 
Now, of course, there is another option. That's that you simply delete files. This might be the case if you've got some files that you're absolutely sure you'll never need anymore. For instance you may have a project where you downloaded a ton of graphics and only used a few out of that selection and you're sure you don't need the rest or you can get the rest from somewhere else if you need them in the future and you can just delete them. You don't need your own copies. Or maybe you export several versions of a video to see which one worked better for you and you can just delete the versions that you didn't need anymore. So there are a lot of different cases where you can just delete files rather than archive them if you're absolutely sure you don't want those files any longer. 
Now note that this is completely different than the opposite issue where you've got very limited local space but plenty of iCloud Drive storage space. If that is the case then all you need to do is turn on Optimize Mac Storage if you don't have it on already. You don't need to actually move things around at all. Just let the optimize function figure out which files are used most of the time, how much space you've got locally and it will figure out which files to cache locally and which files to only have on iCloud Drive.
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Free Up Space On iCloud Drive”

Kevin Richard

8 months ago

My scenario is the last one - limited local space, plenty of iCloud space, Optimized turned on. Almost all files show the cloud logo. This works great but Spotlight search doesn't find files that I know exist especially when using search terms in the content of the files. Is there a solution for this unwanted side effect of having files stored in iCloud?

Gary Rosenzweig

Kevin: I suppose it can't see the content because it doesn't exist yet on the local drive. Haven't experimented with it. The only solution I can think of is to use good descriptive file names and search with that in mind. Either that or make sure your next Mac has plenty of local drive space.

Thank you!

Bern Shanfield

These tutorials where you create graphics to clarify a process and explanation, are you doing your best teaching. Very well done and thank you for taking the time and effort! As with many of your videos, I understood and could perform all that was presented but could not shed light on the matter in communicating this to others that your video brings. Very helpful.

Stephen Schulte

2 months ago

I want to put files on my Mac onto iCloud Drive but I DON'T WANT these files duplicated on my Mac! I have 200 gb of files in a folder on my Mac. Now I copy this folder to my 2 tb iCloud drive. BUT THEN iCLOUD DUPLICATES THIS FOLDER ON MY MAC AND I NOW GO FROM 200 gb stored on my Mac to 400 gb PLUS 200 gb on iCloud! 3 copies of the same thing - but I only want the original and the iCloud Drive copy. (Don't want to optimize nor to have my Documents & Desktop on iCloud Drive). HOW TO DO THIS?

Stephen: Move them to iCloud Drive, don't "Copy" them to iCloud Drive. But then you contradict by saying "I only want the original and the iCloud Drive copy" -- which is two copies, so I'm not sure what you want. Perhaps try to watch this video because maybe you are misunderstanding what iCloud Drive is. https://macmost.com/understanding-icloud-drive-and-the-optimize-mac-storage-option.html

How To Free Up Space On iCloud Drive

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Free Up Space On iCloud Drive”

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