How To Safely Turn Off iCloud Drive

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at how to safely get your files off of iCloud Drive. 

So let's say you've got your Desktop & Documents folders set to be on iCloud Drive.  You've also go the Optimize Mac Storage setting On. This is a typical way to use your Mac. All your recent and frequently accessed files are always cached locally and ones you haven't used in a long time may be offloaded to save you space. But let's say now that you want to get your files off of iCloud Drive. Maybe you need to switch off iCloud Drive for a while or maybe you've got too much stuff there and you want to do some spring cleaning. Whatever your reasons for doing that, how can you do it safely because it seems like if you turn off Desktop & Documents folders you may loose the files there. If you turn off iCloud Drive you may loose all the files in iCloud Drive. But that is not actually the case. 

If you were to turn off Desktop & Documents folders in your iCloud Drive settings you would simply have a separate Desktop and a separate Documents folder locally, separate from the one in iCloud Drive. But you could still access both of them. So your files wouldn't go anywhere. They'd still be on iCloud Drive but you wouldn't be able to see them on your Mac unless you specifically went to your iCloud Drive Desktop & Documents folders, not your local Desktop & Documents folders. 

So, for instance, here I am in my Documents folder. I can click on Documents here on the left and it takes me to it or I can use Go and then Documents to go there. If I Command click on the title here it will show me the full path to this folder and you can see Documents is simply at the top level of iCloud Drive. As a matter of fact if I go to iCloud Drive and there's an item here in the left sidebar as well, you can see everything at the top level of iCloud Drive including my Desktop folder and my Documents folder. 

On the other hand if I go to the top level for my computer I'll see my local drive. There it is right there. I'll dive down into that. Then I'll see my Users folder. I'll dive down into that then I'll see all the User accounts on this Mac. This is my Home Folder here. It's got a little icon next to it with a house to let me know this is my current Home Folder. I've other accounts and these are the Home Folders for those. I'm going to dive down into this one and you notice here there's no Desktop and there's no Documents folder. That's because they are in iCloud Drive. If I had Desktop & Documents in iCloud Drive turned Off then those two folders would be here. We'll see that in a minute. Note that your Home Folder is on your Local Drive in your Users Folder. So this represents files that are not part of iCloud Drive at all. They only exist on this Mac. 

Taking a look at a second Finder window here I see the top level iCloud Drive. So this represents everything on iCloud Drive. This really represents everything that I have local on my Mac. You can see the Desktop folder here and it even has the two files here that I can see on my Desktop. My Documents folder, with all of these files, they are here in iCloud Drive. I have no Desktop or Documents folder here locally. So what happens if I were to go into System Settings and then go to iCloud, go to Drive, and then turn this Off. Well, let's do it and see. I'm going to switch it off here and I'm going to turn this feature off. So I haven't turned off iCloud Drive. I'm still using that. I'm just turning off the Desktop & Documents folders feature. 

So this restores my Desktop & Documents folders to the Home Folder here. But there's nothing in either one of them. It starts me off with two blank folders. So where did all my stuff go? It looks like it was all deleted. But it actually didn't move at all. In iCloud Drive I still have the Desktop & Documents folders that were there before and if I look in them all of the files that were there before are still there. They haven't moved at all. The difference now though is if I use the Go Menu and go to Documents or Go and go to Desktop or look here on my Desktop, it's looking at the folders in the local Home Folder which have nothing in them. However if I go to iCloud Drive or simply click on iCloud Drive here in the left sidebar I can see both of those folders there. So all my stuff is still there. There's no problem. It actually hasn't moved at all. There's just a slight shift in how I accessed them. The Desktop & Documents items in the left sidebar or the actual Desktop itself, they're pointing to these two folders here. The iCloud Drive folders for Desktop & Documents are separate. This is so that on your iPhone, on your iPad, or on another Mac you actually can be using these as your Desktop & Documents folders if you want. It is just on this Mac that the default Desktop & Documents folders accessed by the sidebar and by the Go Menu are not the iCloud Drive ones but the local ones. So you haven't lost anything at all. You've just switch how you accessed things.

Now what happens if you turn it back on? You can pretty much guess what happens there. The Desktop & Documents folders that are in your Home Folders they disappear and the Finder Sidebar items and the Go Menu, they go to the iCloud Drive versions again. But what happens if you've put files in the local version like I've done here. In the Desktop and iCloud Drive I haven't touched it, it still has those two files there. But I put a new file here in the Desktop folder locally. So, now  when I go to System Settings and I turn this back on, as you can guess, it is going to merge them. It won't get rid of anything. So I'll turn it On like this. What you can see what it's going to do is create a folder to store these items. This will prevent any conflicts where they're, say, the same file names. So now I've got the two files that were there before in iCloud Drive and I've got a new folder and it is just names Desktop Mac Studio and inside I find that one file. I can do with it what I want. I can move it up to the Desktop if I want or anywhere else. 

But you can see now in my Home Folder the Desktop & Documents folders are gone and once again the Go Menu and the sidebar items link to the one and only Desktop & Documents folders which are part of iCloud Drive. But let's say you wanted to get everything out of the Desktop folder and the Documents folder, move it to your local Home Folder instead of having it in iCloud Drive. Well, I'm going to show you two methods for doing that. One is simpler and the other is more steps but it is less prone to error. 

The simpler way to do it is simply turn off the iCloud Desktop & Documents folders option, like that. Now with that off you have restored your Desktop Folder and your Documents Folder into your Home Folder. But there is nothing in there. They're empty.

In iCloud Drive you still have your Desktop & Documents folder as you would expect but what you really want is the files to be here in your Home Folder, not in iCloud Drive. So now just simply move them. For instance I can select the two files here on my Desktop and drag them to the Desktop. I can select all of the files and folders here in the Documents folder and move them to the Documents folder in my Home Folder. Thus emptying out both of these. These are both empty now. So iCloud Drive always has the Desktop & Documents folder for use for other devices. But they're empty now. I just have my Desktop & Documents in my Home Folder like I want and it was very easy to do with this method. 

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Now let's look at another way to do it. So, before turning off Desktop & Documents folders let's get the files off first. Then throw the switch. So here in iCloud Drive I've got my Desktop & Documents folders filled with files. So I'm going to create a new folder here in the Home Folder and I'm going to call it Desktop Temp. I'm going to create another one and call it Documents Temp. Now I'm going to move the files from my iCloud Drive Desktop Folder into Desktop Temp. Taking them out of iCloud Drive and making them just local in these temporary folders. I'm going to do the same thing with the Documents Folder. I'm going to select all the files in it and I'm going to move them to Documents Temp. Move them all there. Now that may actually take some time if you're got the Optimize feature turned On and not all the files are downloaded. It will download the ones it doesn't have cached locally first before moving them. So now I've got iCloud Drive Desktop & Documents folders empty, as you can see here. But, on my local drive I've got these folders I created called Desktop Temp and Document Temp filled with those files. Those files are now local. 

Turning off Desktop & Documents now in iCloud Drive really doesn't affect very much because these folders are empty. Now I can turn them Off, just like that, and now you can see iCloud Drive nothing has really changed. The Desktop & Documents folders are still there in case an iPhone, an iPad, or another Mac needs to use them. But here in my Home Folder it's restored my Documents Folder and my Desktop Folder. But they're empty right now. Remember I put everything in Desktop Temp for Desktop. So I"m just going to move these files to the Desktop Folder and get rid of the now empty Desktop Temp folder. I'm going to move the contents of the Documents Temp and put them in my Documents Folder. Now I can get rid of the now empty Documents Temp folder. So now I've got all my files in Desktop, in Documents on my local drive in my Home Folder. Nothing in iCloud Drive. I did it in a few more steps than the previous technique but in a way that might feel a little safer. 

Now, what about the other folders in iCloud Drive. You're going to find that many apps create folders here for use by those apps. For instance, the Pages folder may have a bunch of Pages documents. It just becomes the default save location especially for the iPhone and iPad to save things like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote documents. Other apps, even third party apps may also use it as the default location. So what you would want to do is go through each of these folders. See what is in it and move that to your local Home Folder. So, for instance, in this Keynote folder here I can simply drag the Keynote folder to my Documents Folder and what it will do there is it will copy the files to a folder, it's going to use that same name Keynote, here in my Documents folder. So I can do that with my Keynote folder here. I can do that with say my Numbers folder here. Just drag that to my local Documents folder there, and just make sure I've got copies of all of these files. Notice how it's copying them, not actually moving them. So you're going to end up with duplicates now. So after confirming that all of these files are in fact here in your Document folder you may want to delete everything from here. Just do that for each one of the folders you find in iCloud Drive. It's also fairly normal to have very few or no extra folders here or they are simply empty. But if your goal is to clear out iCloud Drive and make sure you get everything you're probably going to want to examine each one. 

Now, at this point you could turn off iCloud Drive. After all if you've cleared out everything from iCloud Drive there are no files in here. Nothing for you to access. But it doesn't hurt to leave it On. Your Desktop & Document Folders are stored locally. But if you want to you can. Now this doesn't get rid of iCloud Drive. It's still there. You're just removing access from your Mac in the Finder. You do have the option here, when you do this, to keep a copy. So we've done everything manually up to this point. Removing everything and putting it where we want before turning Off iCloud Drive. But you could have just used this option here to automatically have everything moved and saved to a  special folder if you really wanted to. 

I'm going to choose Remove From Mac just to demonstrate what happens. Now you can see all your iCloud Drive options have collapsed, because you don't have iCloud Drive anymore. If I use Go and go to iCloud Drive you could see a message here saying that iCloud Drive isn't connected. But just to show that iCloud Drive is still there, you're just not seeing it in the Finder, you can go to iCloud.com and you can sign-in and once there you could go to Drive. You'll see all of your files that you've left there, if there are any, in this case it is just those empty folders now. But they are all still there. You'd be able to access them in the Files App on your iPhone, on your iPad, or using iCloud Drive on other Macs. The only change from turning this off is now you can't access them in the Finder anymore. If I turn it back On, then I've restored my ability to go to iCloud Drive again in the Go Menu or in the left sidebar and I'll find everything there. Although it may take a few minutes to actually see everything appear. 

So, if you do need to clear out your iCloud Drive folder for any reason and want to save all the files locally, I've given you a couple of options for doing that. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.