Is your iCloud running low on storage after macOS Sierra upgrade? You might need to stop iCloud from syncing desktop folders and documents on your Macs using macOS. With the introduction of macOS Sierra, Apple provided the feature to automatically sync your documents and desktop folders on your Mac to your iCloud.
RELATED: How to Optimize Storage using macOS Sierra
Contents
The Symptoms
Many users who have limited iCloud storage often find that their MacBook documents and desktop folders are eating up a lot of their iCloud space. The continuous syncing operation on your Mac can be annoying as well.
In this article, we show you how you to stop iCloud from syncing documents and desktop folders with a few quick and easy steps.
How-To Stop iCloud From Automatically Saving Files
Step – 1 Click on > System Preferences > iCloud icon
And choose the Options button on the right. (First row)
Step – 2 Locate Your Folders
When you open the iCloud Drive options, find the Desktop and Documents Folders check box.
Uncheck this box and confirm by clicking Turn Off.
Step – 3 Transfer files
Now that you have chosen to remove desktop and documents from syncing to your iCloud drive, you need to transfer these files to their original locations on your Macbook.
Using these simple settings, you can enable and disable the syncing of your desktop folders and documents and manage your iCloud storage space.
Need Another Option?
If you want to leave iCloud Desktop and Documents turned on, BUT you don’t want some of your private or older files stored in iCloud, use Finder and move those files to another folder other than Desktop or Documents.
How to Reclaim Disk Space on Your MacBook for Free
When it comes to storage management, macOS Sierra now also includes built-in tools that can help you easily manage disk usage of your MacBook. You do not need any third party tools or apps to achieve this.
Click on the Apple menu > About This Mac > Storage tab. Disk usage of your MacBook shows up. Click on Manage.
Scroll down to the bottom of the next screen and click on Review Files in the Reduce Clutter section. The name says it all!
On the next screen, Select Documents from the left-hand panel. Find the three tabs on the main screen. Large Files, Downloads and File Browser.
As the name suggests, the large files tab shows all your big files on the disk that are hogging your space. Click on Last Accessed to sort files by access date. Move or archive these files or remove them from your MacBook to save space.
To delete a file, Ctrl+Click, and select Delete. You can also select multiple files for deletion using Ctrl+click and choose Remove.
This section makes it easy to review your disk space usage on your Macbook. You manage your iCloud drive space, organize your iOS files (old backups), download folders and Trash folders, all from one central location.
macOS’ File Browser
We love the File Browser feature as it lets you dig deep into folders and sub-folders to find biggest space wasters so that you better manage your SSD.
Before Sierra, we used DaisyDisk app to do most of our disk management tasks, but we are slowly getting the hang of the new built-in macOS Sierra disk management functionality.
We hope that the simple MacBook tips in this article were helpful. Please let us know if you have any questions or feel free to share some of your favorite tips below.