too many icloud drive folders on my iMac?

Thank you for your reply. I had read that prior to posting and looked again. Regarding my question about optimisation, I was wondering how adding more files to my drive is freeing up storage space? It's counter intuitive to me:

HERE, I would have thought checking the above box would have done just the opposite.

That to me is not actually freeing up space, not no way, not no how.

Howdy Eric,

Thank you for taking the time to answer me.

I verified that the data was in the iCloud (I am 71 years old, and this iCloud stuff is really scary to me regarding security, so I really hate to use it and was using an Apple Airport Time Capsule until the backup function started to malfunction, a concern that I think that Apple has refused to correct).

However, I got a bit confused; what did you mean by delete them files, move to trash? If so, the second sentence really throws me off. Would the files not be in the trash, and be there regardless of logging? Or perhaps by delete, you meant some other macOS trick that I am unaware of or you meant using the terminal command line?

I am not bird dogging you here, I am just trying to learn, and to learn, one must ask.

Howdy Eric,

Thank you for the clarification. Actually, I prefer to delete things from the console, update the locate db search again to see if any remaining or related files are around and do it all again if they do.

REGARDING TIME MACHINE

The drives on the Time Capsule (2 TB) or the drive software has gone bad on mine. Some time ago, I reported and asked about this problem and about reports that Apple was abandoning the Time Capsule, on this site and some guy did the old "what are your sources, prove it etc." I gave him links about it and told him that I had even talked to an Apple rep regarding it when we were doing the old Apple access to my screen troubleshooting thing who also said that development had been stopped, worse, even with the rep on screen with me, the fix resulted in me loosing all the back up data on the disks. Anyway, this person basically refused to believe anything that I said or give him the links to.

Then less than a month later all the problems with backing up started again. The data remained on the drives (but recovering those files was iffy), but the actual backup (automatic or manual) failed. Therefore, I quit using it because it was so unreliable.

Now there are more reports out that are basically are reaffirming the 2016 reports.

If you go to the Apple online store (the only place that you can get one - not in the "real" store [not even in 2016]) you will see that Apple has finally added "while supplies last" statement. I have as of yet to see the official Apple statement, just the various news site reports. I believe that Apple did not make an actual public statement or else they have made very hard to find on the search engines, because they wanted to sell all of these devices that they had.

Regarding Time Machine backups, at this time, I use it to backup to a Seagate external drive and that appears to work fine.