Does iCloud drive use up hard drive storage space?

A hardwired NAS would be more reliable, and faster as well.

In Win7 all iCloud Drive capacity is count against C drive.

How can we fix this?

Must be a fix on the registry on Windows7...

When I uploaded to the iCloud my photos it took away my storage on my computer. Is this correct, or a way around that.

What don't you understand about Optimize Storage, it seems very clear to me.

iCloud works exactly as advertised and it's certainly far from confusing. Clearly, you prefer to assume how things work rather than actually finding out.

who on earth is going to buy 2TB storage with a 256GB SSD in their laptop and the stored data has to sit on the laptop too??

If it is bought on iCloud Drive nobody with any common sense.

who on earth is going to buy 2TB storage with a 256GB SSD in their laptop

Most people (that have 2 TB of documents) I would imagine, that's exactly what iCloud is for.

Obviously. Then who would buy it given the built in storage on Apple devices?

According to Apple, "If you need to access a file that you deleted within the last 30 days, you can recover it from iCloud.com." if not backed up by Apple, then where are the deleted files stored?

Deletions are stored in iCloud for a limited time, long enough for you to change your mind.

Well that's what I thought until I realised that Drive is not external storage, it's synched. So if you don't have 2TB on your computer, how are you going to synch 2TB in the Cloud?

So if you don't have 2TB on your computer, how are you going to synch 2TB in the Cloud?

Enable optimisation, which is exactly what it is for.

But it will be at the cost of deleting rarely used files from your Mac

They aren't deleted, they are optimised.

Then I can only assume you don't use it otherwise you wouldn't need to rely on what anyone says, I do use it, I know exactly how it works, they aren't deleted, they are optimised.

TIme Machine? Backup drive that doesn't charge rent?