Can I safely delete three icloud drive (archive) folders that take almost 80GB of storage?

Question

I know there's already a similar question about this, but the answer "If you don't need their contents, you can delete both of them." is not clear to me because I need the contents, just not three copies of them. So I guess the question is: are these folders like old backups? Is that the reason there is many of them: they are backups from different times?

Here is my situation:

The first screenshot is of the three folders I'd like to delete. The second one is the "true location" of the data on icloud.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

When you turn off iCloud syncing - everything that was in the location for syncing gets moved here.

When you have syncing enabled - the location where newly created (not yet saved to the cloud) files get written is:

~/Library/Mobile Documents

That location also keeps copies of cloud backed files present locally while you have space on the Mac. Over time, if you start running low on space, they get deleted from the local cache and only exist as stub files that cause the actual files to be downloaded from iCloud.

You have several versions of archive since you have turned off syncing several times. You can merge the contents of the folders or just delete as fits your needs.

I use Kaleidoscope app to compare folders / merge these but there are other tools that work if you don’t want to do it by hand.