I couldn't work out how my 1TB hard drive was so full, despite moving large data/files to external hard drive. It turns out I have 700GB in the .trash here which I can't work out how to delete - I can work out how to recover them to a new drive but I don't need them anyway but can't access them directly that I can work out. I see the question asked before but no definitive answer.
Which system version is installed on your Mac? The directory
/Users/Library/mobile documents/com~apple~cloudDocs
is the place, where iCloud Drive is downloading the local shadow copies of your iCloud Drive documents to, so you can work with them offline.
The safest way to remove them is to enable the option "Optimize Mac Storage" in the System Preferences > iCloud . This tells iCloud that iCloud can remove the downloads of documents, when you are not working with them.
You can also remove the downloads manually, but not by deleting them. Select large fils on iCloud Drive, then ctrl-click them and use the command "Remove download".
Thank you. I eventually managed to remove them with disk drill - I couldn't even see them in terminal. (And system 12.6)
Great idea!
How do I delete files from user/library/mobile documents/com~apple~cloudDocs?
