I have very little space left on my hard drive and see that 27gb is being used for iCloud documents. How do i delete these whilst retaining them in my cloud?
MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2013), iOS 12.0.1
While Optimization will help, it won't remove all the documents until space is required.
iCloud is a syncing system, not an external 'hard drive'.
For what you want to do, you need a different cloud based solution such as Dropbox, OneDrive, or Flicker.
Go to: Settings --> iCloud --> select iCloud Drive options --> check the box in the down left corner which says optimize my Mac storage
If you don't want to use iCloud Drive at all on your Mac you can also disable it. Make sure so to make a backup copy of your documents because they won't be stored in the cloud anymore.
For more info look here: iCloud Drive FAQ - Apple Support
How do i delete documents from my MacBook Air and retain them in Icloud
