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Im on a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016) running 10.13.5 (Latest High Sierra )

Here is a screenshot of my storage tab :

enter image description here

As you can see the system takes quite a lot of space. After using an app called Grandperspective to get a more detailed view of disk allocation it seems I've got a folder named cloudDocs in Application Support That weighs around 80GB.

I'd like to point out that I have lately been freeing a lot of space on my mac in order to turn off the Icloud feature that helps saving space by uploading old files or files not used often to the cloud and removing them from the mac.

I believe this CloudDocs folder is a result of turning off this "space saving option" and the long download process that resulted.

What is that folder for? Can I delete it?

Thank you for your help

Alex

Ps : this is not an issue related to time machine local backups as I have already checked for those

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  • I am also facing the same issue and it was not clear for me from the checked answer, is it ok for me to delete the folder if I do not want to use iCloud?
    – Aamir Jamal
    Commented Sep 18, 2020 at 11:59

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/CloudDocs

It is part of Apples iCloud service and will synchronize your Desktop and Documents folder with iCloud Drive. If you do want to store your Documents to iCloud this folder is required and iCloud Drive needs to be enabled.

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  • Thanks for the reply, Why is it so big? What would happen if I deleted it's content?
    – Alexandre Babeanu
    Commented Jul 20, 2018 at 9:35
  • The folder CloudDocs stores your files/folders. File size depends on your file you have synced to iCloud. It's required to sync your files across multiple devices and iCloud web interface. It's not a bug, it's a feature. If you delete your files they will be removed and disappear on all your devices.
    – user136834
    Commented Jul 20, 2018 at 9:49
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    Only problem is that these local files are much bigger than the files on my cloud, on my cloud I have my documents which is the same size as my local documents folder and about 24 GB of pictures and backups so what are the remaining 60 GB?
    – Alexandre Babeanu
    Commented Jul 20, 2018 at 10:31
  • Okay so seems like these are just temp files since free space is increasing on mac as I download cloud content
    – Alexandre Babeanu
    Commented Jul 20, 2018 at 10:35
  • I have a similar issue where I have 1807 versions of a few Pages and Numbers files in the CloudDocs folder, nothing else. It doesn't make too much sense to me. I suspect this is causing my TM backups to become corrupted.
    – NotationMaster
    Commented Mar 25, 2019 at 21:14

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