How does one control icloud?

AT one point, earlier in the process, that might have worked. Not any more. I've gone through that sequence of maneuvers over and over and over, but the problem won't go away. I can uncheck or deselect all the items and options I want, restart, and when I open iCloud again, they are all back on and collecting my files for destruction.

I think you are right. I've been struggling with this mess for close to 3 weeks, and no part of iCloud functions the way the rest of Apple's offerings do. I also know, from experience, that removing files from the app definitely does NOT happen at will. It can take one or two days of hands-off for file-deletion requests to take effect. I've watched it happen. From a distance. So I will take your advice, knowing that in about two weeks my iCloud account will stop on its own, and I can either start it again, like a clean install, or live without it. Thanks.

Thanks for the reply. I believe you. What distinguishes iCloud, IMHO, is the inadequacy of documentation, regarding both how it will function when the user enables it, and what to expect when trying to DIS-enable it. When I ask questions like the one I asked to start this thread, the first replies are usually happy-talk, straight out of the user's manual. When I took the growing problem to AppleCare and the Apple store nearest to me, I got a more realistic appraisal. It was a mess, and I will be the first to admit that the mess was my doing, but I had no way of knowing in advance what was going to happen, because the information is not there. In brief: starting from the 5GB base config, I thought it sounded like a good idea, so I bumped it up to 2TB. But my finances changed radically not long after that, so I opted to drop the storage down to 50GB, without researching the likely consequences. Nothing went right, of course. And it continued to not go right for the next two weeks or so. I started talking to AppleCare after a week of that, and slowly began to get the idea how iCloud works. It's still mysterious, but I have succeeded at some of my attempts to control it. At least now I have it in hand well enough to simply wait for it to die in mid-May, when April's .99 cents runs out, then decide what to do about it.

Clearly we don't agree on much about icloud. I will agree that impatience with its inability to turn on a dime is unwise, but I've been working with it long enough to know that it IS possible for the user to move selected files into iCloud drive-perhaps that's the "one small exception". Saying "no control is required", however, is not the same as saying "No control is possible", and the latter statement is the more accurate. In my case, I wanted to reduce my storage space to 50GB from 2TB, and even though I hadn't consciously requested that my entire boot drive be taken over by iCloud, that's what had happened, and the sudden reduction effectively wiped out the computer. I'm sure there's a way to make that change in storage without a negative result, but I have been unable to find it in Apple's documentation. Recovery took quite a while.