Stop Storing Icloud files on the cloud AND on my mac. Cloud only please.

Hi All,

I keep getting the "your disk is almost full" message, only to discover that 160 GB (almost 75% of my hard drive) is occupied by "icloud drive". This is puzzling to me because I thought the whole idea of the cloud was to store all these photos, etc. OFF the hard drive in order to free up space. Right now I find myself both paying for offboard storage and using it up at the same time.

I did a few google searches and I couldn't find anything that matched my concern. Probably, though, this is because I honestly just don't know much about making computers work right. I opened up preferences for the Icloud storage and found information about what to put in the cloud but no boxes to check or uncheck about how much to keep on the disk. To be more clear, I don't want to store any icloud information on my disk. That's why it's on the cloud.

I don't imagine anyone posts on these discussion boards because their happy and carefree with their computer, but I have to confess how angry I am to be paying for storage that won't get off my **** machine. I just bought a new computer with larger memory for this very reason: there was never enough space and here I can't get my photos, etc. to get off the machine and into the cloud where they belong. While typing this message, I've had four windows pop up telling me I can't receive a new message because there's no room and two pop up windows telling me "your disk is almost full".

Does anyone know what I might be able to do about this?