Getting disk space back from iCloud Drive without deleting a single file

Most advice about a full Mac ends with deleting something. There is one large category of space you can give back without deleting anything, and most people do not know it exists: the local copies of iCloud Drive files you have already downloaded.

Two copies of every file you opened

iCloud Drive keeps the canonical copy of each file on Apple's servers. When you open a file on your Mac, macOS downloads it and keeps the downloaded copy on your disk so that the next open is instant. Over months, that adds up. Every attachment you glanced at, every document a colleague shared, every photo you dragged into a folder is now sitting on your SSD as well as in iCloud.

macOS can remove the local copy and leave the cloud one. Apple calls this evicting the file. In the Finder, the file stays in its folder with a small cloud icon next to it; double-clicking downloads it again. Nothing has been deleted. The file is exactly as safe as it was, because the copy that matters was always the one in iCloud.

Why it is awkward to do by hand

You can evict a file manually: right-click it in the Finder and choose Remove Download. The trouble is scale. The option works on one file or one selection at a time, there is no view that lists everything you have downloaded sorted by size, and the Finder does not tell you how much a folder's local copies add up to. macOS has an Optimize Mac Storage setting that evicts automatically when the disk is nearly full, but it picks the files itself and does not say what it chose.

What Cloud Cleanup does

SweepyMac's Cloud Cleanup module does the job in one pass. It looks through iCloud Drive for files that have a local download and shows what that adds up to. When you press the button, it asks macOS to evict them, exactly as Remove Download does, and then reports what was actually freed rather than what it expected to free.

Two rules keep it safe. It only touches files that are fully uploaded; anything still syncing is left alone, so there is never a moment where the only copy is the one being removed. And it never deletes. The files stay in iCloud, the Finder still lists them, and opening one pulls it back.

This is the one module in SweepyMac that is not Trash-based. There is no Trash to put a local copy in, because the copy was never the file. So there is no Undo button either; the undo is opening the file again. The user guide says this in so many words, because we did not want it to be a surprise.

When it is worth doing

Cloud Cleanup pays off when three things are true. You use iCloud Drive for a lot of files. Your Mac's disk is small relative to that, which describes most laptops with a 256 GB or 512 GB drive. And you have a reliable connection, because a file you evict today has to come back over the network when you next open it.

It pays off less when you work offline often, or when the files are large and slow to re-download. A video editor who evicts a 40 GB project folder and then opens a laptop on a train has made a bad trade. For that kind of file, SweepyMac's Disk module is the better first stop: it draws the whole volume to scale, so you can see whether the real problem is iCloud at all.

Checking the result

After a run, the Disk module's storage bar will have moved, and the amount it moved by should match the figure Cloud Cleanup reported. If you want to confirm nothing is gone, open iCloud Drive in the Finder and look for the cloud icons on the files you evicted. Each is one double-click from being local again.

Cloud Cleanup is part of SweepyMac, which has a three-day trial and a licence that covers one, two or five Macs.