more iCloud confusion

[IgorP]

I'm trying to back out of iCloud. I wish I'd never heard of it, but here I am. I'm trying to delete 119 GB of iCloud Drive to go down to just 5GB for photos, messages and contacts -- nothing else. Everything else is turned off. When I go to Finder/iCloud drive I get this:


When I click on "Manage" I get this:



I don't even know what the 119.2 gigs are! (?) When I click on iCloud Drive I get this:



This tells me to do exactly what I'm trying to do, viz: open iCloud drive and delete documents, but how do I get at the 119 gigs so I can start deleting? Frustration level high...

I know and appreciate that Randy and MacInWin et al have put a lot of time into trying to sort out the confusion over iCloud, and I've read it all plus viewed number YouTube videos and I'm still lost. Thanks in advance for helping me out of this mess.

 

[ferrarr]

Do you see, in your first image where it "Saved to iCloud"? And the "See All" button next to it? If you select that, you can see all apps that have saved data to iCloud.

 

[Jimmysb]

Go to iCloud on the web to see your drive.

 

[MacInWin]

You have almost 120GB of data in a folder on your Mac called "iCloud drive." Find that folder using FInder and either delete everything in it, or move everything in it to some other folder NOT called "iCloud Drive" and let it sync (it will take a bit of time). Eventually, your cloud storage will clear out. It may take a while for the items in your iCloud Drive folder to be downloaded and moved, depending on your internet speeds and the server speeds. Patience.

EDIT: And make BACKUPS before you do anything. BACKUP.

 

[Rod]

I'm trying to delete 119 GB of iCloud Drive to go down to just 5GB for photos, messages and contacts -- nothing else

I think you have set yourself an almost impossible task Igor. The default 5GB (Gigabytes) you get when you originally setup an Apple account is woefully inadequate for today's computers.

I see that you currently subscribe to iCloud+ with it's 200GB of storage plus it's other features which you apparently don't use.

I note that you are not syncing Passwords, Notes, Messages or Mail so that means apart from not storing them they will not sync (be the same) on your other Apple devices. For example if you delete an email on your Mac it would be deleted on your other Apple devices, the same goes for Passwords, Notes ect, but perhaps you don't have any other Apple devices, like an iPhone? And you could always overcome this by syncing via USB cable of course like we did in the "old days".

So to start with if you intend to reduce your iCloud storage plan to the free 5GB plan you had better have a very rigorous backup plan. External hard drives x 2 at least and one dedicated to Time Machine which is not infallible. Unless you already have reliable large storage (preferably larger than your internal HD) USB SSD External Hard Drives purchasing them will set you back more than you currently pay for a years subscription to iCloud + 200GB.

Yes, you can remove everything from the iCloud Drive folder as MacInWin suggests and put those files elsewhere on your computer assuming you have free storage space and remember, you need at least 20% of your Mac's storage free or it will slow down to snails pace. eg. I have 512GB of storage on my Macbook Pro so I need to keep a min of 100GB free. Currently I have 200GB free and I do this by storing a large amount of my Documents in iCloud Drive, some 69GB in total. I only download them to my computer if I need them which is rarely.

Have you clicked on the Saved to iCloud "See All" button shown in your first screen shot? Just to check what else may be using iCloud.

Personally I think you are making a mistake not to store/sync at least the bare minimum of items;
Find my Mac,
Passwords and Keychain,
Email,
Notes,
Calendars,
Contacts,
Reminders,
Safari and
Wallet.

Just for the convenience of restoring your data to a new device if nothing else.

Instead I suggest that you at least subscribe to the 50GB plan as below;



It has been our experience that storage grows even with very little data saved/synced to iCloud. Keychain for example will register/store essential certificates for OS versions, user passwords and more. Even with minimum use of your 5GB you will still eventually start receiving notifications that you are running out of iCloud storage.

My opinion is if you can keep under 50GB you will be doing well. I have to assume you will continue to take photos at least.

 

[Jimmysb]

Being a Windows user for many years, I managed my own filing, and specifically photos, so now even after 2 1/2 years on a Mac this is my iCloud:

 

[IgorP]

Do you see, in your first image where it "Saved to iCloud"? And the "See All" button next to it? If you select that, you can see all apps that have saved data to iCloud.

Apparently, I failed to make it clear that I have struggled with this thing for some time. Of course I see the "See All" button. I have clicked on it and every button on every page many times, been to iCloud.com many times, watched multiple YouTube videos, been to the library for books*, etc. Please believe that I have tried everything I can think of before appealing to you guys.

Under "See All" I turned everything off except photos, messages and contacts, total less than 2 GB. I decided I do not care about syncing except for those three, and I am extremely well backed up with external drives + Time Machine + thumb drives for my most critical stuff.

More background: I foolishly signed up for 200 GB and set everything to sync. Only then -- and this was my own stupidity -- did I learn that iCloud actually takes your files off your computer and leaves you with an alias or token or something.* I got uncomfortable about this and tried to back out: what if I didn't have internet access? Would I have my files?

I switched to 50 gigs which caused apoplexy at Apple because they froze everything and proceeded to inundate my phone and computer with messages telling me to upgrade my plan. (I thought they would just dump the extra.) So I switched back to 200 GB in the hope of unfreezing the thing so I could delete the 119 gigs so I could go back to the freebie plan.

*No source that I've found tells you how iCloud actually works; eg, "Sequoia for Dummies" devotes less than one page to the entire subject: nothing about what or where iCloud Drive is or what it does, no mention of iCloud.com or iCloud email address. Just the usual raving about how great it is to have everything synced up but nothing about the actual architecture of the thing.

After a month of trying, I still can't find how to get to the 119 gigs at Apple and delete them. Nothing at iCloud.com offers me that option (although it would seem that it should). Turning them off under "See All" doesn't get rid of them either.

 

[MacInWin]

Apparently, I failed to make it clear that I have struggled with this thing for some time. Of course I see the "See All" button. I have clicked on it and every button on every page many times, been to iCloud.com many times, watched multiple YouTube videos, been to the library for books*, etc. Please believe that I have tried everything I can think of before appealing to you guys.

Under "See All" I turned everything off except photos, messages and contacts, total less than 2 GB. I decided I do not care about syncing except for those three, and I am extremely well backed up with external drives + Time Machine + thumb drives for my most critical stuff.

More background: I foolishly signed up for 200 GB and set everything to sync. Only then -- and this was my own stupidity -- did I learn that iCloud actually takes your files off your computer and leaves you with an alias or token or something.* I got uncomfortable about this and tried to back out: what if I didn't have internet access? Would I have my files?

I switched to 50 gigs which caused apoplexy at Apple because they froze everything and proceeded to inundate my phone and computer with messages telling me to upgrade my plan. (I thought they would just dump the extra.) So I switched back to 200 GB in the hope of unfreezing the thing so I could delete the 119 gigs so I could go back to the freebie plan.

*No source that I've found tells you how iCloud actually works; eg, "Sequoia for Dummies" devotes less than one page to the entire subject: nothing about what or where iCloud Drive is or what it does, no mention of iCloud.com or iCloud email address. Just the usual raving about how great it is to have everything synced up but nothing about the actual architecture of the thing.

After a month of trying, I still can't find how to get to the 119 gigs at Apple and delete them. Nothing at iCloud.com offers me that option (although it would seem that it should). Turning them off under "See All" doesn't get rid of them either.

I told you how to get rid of most of it. Re-read my post #4.

EDIT: If you want more, read this post:

iCloud versus iCloud Drive Confusion

Hi All, I am 100% new to iCloud, so please pardon my ignorance. I've studied here and every Apple article I can find, but I'm still confused. When I turn on iCloud Drive in Settings, the desktop, documents and photos disappear from Finder. If the computer is offline (internet goes down often)...

www.mac-forums.com

 

[IgorP]

Personally I think you are making a mistake not to store/sync at least the bare minimum of items;
Find my Mac,
Passwords and Keychain,
Email,
Notes,
Calendars,
Contacts,
Reminders,
Safari and
Wallet.

My only device other than this computer is an iPhone. I do not want or use any passwords on my phone.

I have Find My Mac/Phone turned on; I didn't know it needed iCloud.

I do not use email or Safari on my phone. I do not use Notes, Calendars, Reminder or Wallet.

I am not the kind of active user that you guys are. I was, but no longer am. I'm a long-retired Silicon Valley electronics engineer. I live in Cupertino and shop, drive or walk by the spaceship every day. In the 90's our shop was all Mac. My colleagues and I were on top of absolutely everything Mac. In the 00's we got bought out and switched to PC's, much to our dismay, and my Mac awareness began to wane. Since I retired it has ceased, because I am no longer in touch with knowledgeable people. Trust me, it will happen to you too, when you are no longer surrounded by helpful colleagues. It's hard to keep up when you're isolated.

Now when I scroll around my phone I realize I have no idea what most of it is, I'm that far behind. (Services? Smart/Burn Folders? No idea, but pretty sure I can live without them.) That doesn't mean I'm dead yet. I'm fluent in Python and have done 70+ Euler Project problems. My Photoshop skills are advanced and I've sold/published dozens of wildlife shots in field guides and magazines.

The photos on my phone that I might want to share are not my professional-grade wildlife photos. Those amount to several hundred gigs and are double backed up separately. The gig or so photos in the Photos app and on my phone are just family snapshots -- nothing that's going to go over 5 gigs.

My concern iCloud began when I tried to copy and send jpegs and tiffs and found that I was copying and sending tokens or aliases instead of real files. I said "I don't need this, this was a mistake, let me out of here." Now I can't get out.

I tried dragging files out of the iCloud folder onto my desktop but that was a disaster. It left a token in the folder and when I deleted that, the file, or maybe it was just a token, disappeared from my desktop. Also the amount of storage increased, so I had to stop that and admit I needed serious help, thus my appeal here.

I could scrub this computer and rebuild it from scratch (I'm that well backed up) but I'm afraid the problems would persist.

 

[IgorP]

You have almost 120GB of data in a folder on your Mac called "iCloud drive." Find that folder using FInder and either delete everything in it, or move everything in it to some other folder NOT called "iCloud Drive" and let it sync (it will take a bit of time). Eventually, your cloud storage will clear out. It may take a while for the items in your iCloud Drive folder to be downloaded and moved, depending on your internet speeds and the server speeds. Patience.

EDIT: And make BACKUPS before you do anything. BACKUP.

Actually, I don't. When I got to Finder/Go/iCloud Drive, I get this:



Seems to be empty. I don't know how it got turned off. I didn't know you could just turn it off, nor do I know how to turn it back on. All I ever did was to go under "See All" and turn off folders and apps.

When I search "iCloud" with cmd-F I get only this:



Evidence of my past [futile] efforts.

 

[MacInWin]

Try this:

Go to icloud.com, then log into your icloud account with your appleid and password. One of the panes in the display will be for iCloud Drive. Yo can select that one and see the list of what is there. If you are certain that you have everything that is listed there on your Mac, delete them until you have all of them gone.

The rest of your discussion about tokens and needing space is the result of having, at some time, turned on Optimize storage on your Mac and sending the files to the cloud. Then you turned it off, which leads it what you now see in Finder, but the files are still there in the cloud. I suspect they are also sync'd to your iPhone, at least as dataless files, but that doesn't matter as when you delete them from iCloud they will also disappear from the iPHone.

 

[Rod]

In 30 days!

 

[Rod]

IgorP, I apologise if I "talked down" to you we never know what level of expertise users have so, I shoot for the lowest denominator until I'm told otherwise. You obviously have a high level of experience with computers.
I believe that Jake's suggestion will work for you.
I did note in your first screen shot that iCloud Drive is turned off but that does not delete it's contents just it's syncing.
Deleting the contents on iCloud.com will work but as with all iCloud deletion the files may take some time to disappear although I did this with a file of mine and the effect seemed immediate. See below;



After deletion the number of files decreased by one and storage decreased accordingly.

 

[IgorP]

IgorP, I apologise if I "talked down" to you we never know what level of expertise users have so, I shoot for the lowest denominator until I'm told otherwise. You obviously have a high level of experience with computers.
I believe that Jake's suggestion will work for you.
I did note in your first screen shot that iCloud Drive is turned off but that does not delete it's contents just it's syncing.
Deleting the contents on iCloud.com will work but as with all iCloud deletion the files may take some time to disappear although I did this with a file of mine and the effect seemed immediate. See below;

View attachment 40441

After deletion the number of files decreased by one and storage decreased accordingly.

I really appreciate your advice. I did as Jake suggested: I logged in at iCloud.com/Browse and deleted everything. This did nothing to change the 119.9 GB used, but I figured that was because it was now in "Recently Deleted." So I went there and "deleted forever" all but two folders: Documents and Desktop. The rest instantly disappeared and the number of "items" in that folder reduced correspondingly to two. The 119.9 GB still shows as used.

I now have two questions:

1) The two folders remaining in "Recently Deleted" are Desktop and Documents. I do not need either of these since I have completely restored both on my computer. My question is how and why did my desktop get copied to iCloud? Under Settings/iCloud/See All I see no option to copy or sync the desktop. Curiously, I can drag the Desktop folder back to Browse, but not the Documents folder.

Late note: after moving the Desktop folder back and forth I was able to delete it forever, so there's one small item, Documents, left in Recently Deleted, nothing in Browse, and 119.9 GB still used.

2) Do I need to do anything else to get the "storage used" to update; eg, turn iCloud back on on my machine, keep waiting, or...? I'm cautious about turning iCloud back on because it might try to grab my desktop files and leave tokens as it did before. How do I prevent that?

I will want to turn it back on once I get the usage under five gigs.

 

[MacInWin]

The Documents and Desktop folders get created when you turn on "Optimize storage" on the Mac. That setting is in Settings > Storage and is a box labeled "Optimize.." if you do NOT have it turned on. Clicking the box will open a screen to verify that you want to Optimize video files and which has a "cancel" button to get out of optimization. When a user turns optimization on, the user's Desktop and Documents folders are MOVED to iCloud and dataless folders/files are left in their place on the Mac. Turning Optimization off is not as clean. Turning off immediately deletes the dataless folders and files and creates new Desktop and Documents folder, but leaves them empty. Then the iCloud files are downloaded to Desktop and Document folders created in the iCloud Drive folder on the Mac and getting the files from that location to the new, empty folders is left up to the user. Turning Optimization off also does NOT delete the files held in the cloud if there are any other devices attached to the same AppleID account as Apple does not assume that just because you stopped Optimization you also wanted to clear them off off the other devices attached.

As for the storage used, just wait a bit and it should update. You aren't really taking that much space in the real storage as it is heavily compressed. Apple will/should eventually update the data used.

I don't know what your last sentence means, sorry. What do you want to turn back on?

 

[IgorP]

The Documents and Desktop folders get created when you turn on "Optimize storage" on the Mac. That setting is in Settings > Storage and is a box labeled "Optimize.." if you do NOT have it turned on. Clicking the box will open a screen to verify that you want to Optimize video files and which has a "cancel" button to get out of optimization. When a user turns optimization on, the user's Desktop and Documents folders are MOVED to iCloud and dataless folders/files are left in their place on the Mac. Turning Optimization off is not as clean. Turning off immediately deletes the dataless folders and files and creates new Desktop and Documents folder, but leaves them empty. Then the iCloud files are downloaded to Desktop and Document folders created in the iCloud Drive folder on the Mac and getting the files from that location to the new, empty folders is left up to the user. Turning Optimization off also does NOT delete the files held in the cloud if there are any other devices attached to the same AppleID account as Apple does not assume that just because you stopped Optimization you also wanted to clear them off off the other devices attached.

As for the storage used, just wait a bit and it should update. You aren't really taking that much space in the real storage as it is heavily compressed. Apple will/should eventually update the data used.

I don't know what your last sentence means, sorry. What do you want to turn back on?

iCloud. Just for photos, messages and contacts on my iPhone.

No doubt turning on "Optimize Storage" was an egregious mistake, but I do not know how I did it. I cannot find any "Storage" folder or button on my computer. I carefully went through [apple-icon]/System Settings and Finder/System Settings. So I can't find it and I don't know if it's on or off.

I'm using Sequoia 15.5.

 

[ferrarr]

So I can't find it and I don't know if it's on or off.

Look in System Settings -> General -> Storage. Both Store in iCloud, and Optimize Storage are both there.

 

[Rod]

Lots of people have accidentally or deliberately turned "Store Documents and Desktop folders in iCloud Drive" because it was accidental or they simply did not fully understand what it would mean in real terms or, they believed that they could just turn it off and everything would return to how it was. Not an entirely unreasonable expectation but unfortunately not true. Just do a search on this website for 'Store Documents and Desktop folders in iCloud Drive" and you will find lots of references so, you're not alone.

"I carefully went through [apple-icon]/System Settings and Finder/System Settings. So I can't find it and I don't know if it's on or off."

Here is the path;
As ferrarr posted; System Settings -> General -> Storage. Then click "Store in iCloud"



That will take you to the above window. This is confusing because at first glance it appears that Desktop and Documents plus Photos is already turned on. It's not! It would only be ON if I clicked the "Store in iCloud" button. The seperate buttons are there just to allow you to make a choice between Desktop and Documents or Photos or both options. Let me stress that until I click "Store in iCloud" nothing is on. So just click "Cancel" and nothing is changed.

You can click on the Question Mark if you want more details.

 

[Rod]

I might add I think the only reason you had problems with the 50GB plan was because you had (accidentally) already stored more than 50GB in iCloud.
I still think that's the best choice once you've successfully reduced your stored/synced data. I understand you would rather be entirely free of a paid plan but 5GB is very small.

 

[IgorP]

Rod & Jake et al, thank you very much for the patient and thoughtful support. Per your advice I cleared most of my iCloud storage. After a few hours 119 GB was down to 80 GB; overnight it's down to 2 gigs which is enough for me and my iPhone and my family photos. I really don't need it for anything else as my serious work is backed up on an external drive plus Time Machine.

I found the Optimize button and it was turned off, but I must have turned it on at some point. (Optimization is a good thing, no? Who wouldn't want to optimize?) It was when I discovered my desktop files had changed to tokens that I got concerned (well, OK, I panicked, sorry.)

I should add that in the resulting melee, some – not all – of my desktop folders were not recovered; fortunately, I was able to restore them via Time Machine. I hear that Time Machine's not perfect, but it has served me well more than once.

You guys are great. Thanks again.