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Mr. 123

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 20, 2016
386
261
I use iCloud on my Macs (iMac and MBA) and I am having serious issues lately with iCloud downloading very large files which are stored in iCloud Drive and which I made offline.

I don't need them to be downloaded to the computer but macOS just downloads for the hell of it.

I deleted some files of my MBA (which has only a 128GB SSD) because it was barely functioning due to this issue and a few hours later the space was almost filled up again with other files I don't need. The files aren't even files that I open, it can be anything, like a 14GB screen recording of a university lecture that I haven't opened in 4 months in a folder that I haven't opened either. When a 128GB hard drive has 10GBs of files left, why does iCloud think it's a good idea to fill it up with random iCloud files?

In the past I always thought that iCloud did a great job with keeping unused files in the cloud and having them all avaliable to download them when I needed them but in the last couple of months it has not been working on either my iMac or my MBA. I am constantly having a full hard drive and due to iCloud downloading huge amounts of files I don't need. Yesterday I moved my entire media library (700GB) from my iMac to an external hard drive because this kept happening and this morning 250GBs of files I don't need are suddenly downloaded from iCloud.

I have < feeling that this is a Monterey issue because I never experienced it before so if anyone has a solution it would be great!
 
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