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iCloud suddenly downloaded all files without me doing anything. How to reverse?

Last night I had 79 GB of space on my 2016 MBP with Big Sur. As I'm reading the news this morning before doing anything else on my Mac I get a notice that I'm almost out of storage. I was down to around 50 MB and declining. I went to About This Mac / Storage / Manage and clicked the Manage button. Then I clicked the Store In iCloud and checked both buttons. That clawed back a bit over 3 GB so at least the computer can operate but I want all my files in iCloud except the very few I use now. How do I get there again?

This mess did not occur on my 2020 Mac Mini M1 with Big Sur.

Posted on Dec 12, 2020 10:49 AM

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caljim Author

Level 1

15 points

Posted on Dec 13, 2020 6:09 PM

The problem solved when I emptied my trash. I didn't look in the trash before I emptied it unfortunately. I only deleted a few dmg files for upgrading apps recently so it should have emptied fast.. I started the empty trash routine and moved to other desktops. A long while later the trash emptied. There is no way I put that much in trash. The Documents folder in iCloud was 130 GB when I posted this question and now it is 9 GB, what it was before this all started. So I'm assuming that the optimization took all the files that iCloud mysteriously downloaded and put them in trash.

Now I have even more free storage, 100 GB out of a 256 flash drive. Should be enough cushion :-)

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iCloud suddenly downloaded all files without me doing anything. How to reverse?

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