How to get an accurate size of my iCloud Drive folder on my Mac

Tech Support
1

I’m confused on what in my iCloud Drive folder is stored locally on my Mac and what the size of the folder is.

I do not have optimize storage turned on, so my expectation is that all the files in my iCloud Drive folder are also locally stored on my Mac.

  1. From the finder, if I right click on the iCloud Drive and choose get info the size is listed as 8.22 GB.

  2. If I go into System Settings and look at General → Storage then the iCloud Drive shows as 147.7 MB

  3. If I run Daisy Disk and go through Users → Library → Mobile Documents it shows iCloud Drive as being 2.2 GB.

So what’s the actual number? And outside of going through folder by folder and confirming I can access everything without a net connection running, how do I confirm everything is stored locally?

This is one of those areas where I feel it should be easy, but Apple seems to want to hide what’s actually going on.

2

It’s kind of a mess and difficult to tell, I have given up trying to make sense of this. It seems like in your case iCloud Drive is trying to be aggressive not to download everything (that could depend on the amount of real storage space remaining in the hard drive). But then there will probably be revisions of the files themselves and some of them may be even “clones”, so the real allocated disk space is much smaller than what is reported on Finder.

To make sure everything is stored locally, you have this new option in Sequoia:

Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 16.13.32
Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 16.13.32522×540 36.2 KB

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3

I’ve got about 700 GB free on the hard drive so it should be happy to download everything.
I’m guessing the 8.22 GB Finder is reporting is too high, probably for the reasons you mentioned.

I’ll try the Keep Downloaded option you mentioned. Looks like it’s folder by folder, which isn’t too bad.

Thanks!

4

Your iCloud data is located at /Users/[username]/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs but good luck finding it.

In recent versions of macOS Apple has hidden this directory so it doesn’t even show up in Terminal.

To see the directory you have to:

enable the root command,

then in Terminal login as root using the su command, navigate to ~Library/Mobile Documents, then type du -h

The last number it prints is the directory size.

du
du846×168 23.7 KB

Then disable the root user

If you are not familiar, and comfortable, with working in Terminal I do not recommend doing this.

apfs - MacOS, how to get folder size (physical size on disk) - Ask Different (stackexchange.com)

  • Yes, I only have 60M in iCloud Drive. I mainly use it for Photos.
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5

Interesting. I would think that would be the same as what’s showing in Daisy Disk under

image
image2268×132 36.6 KB

I’ll check that tonight with what you sent. Thanks!

1 Like
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I have no idea what Apple’s restrictions on that directory would have, or not have, on DD.

7

An alternate way that still works for me is given at the following link:

Make Library permanently visible in Finder - Apple Community

The option to show the Library folder only appears if you are at the home folder. So, navigate to your home folder or press Command-Shift-H. Select View- > Show View Options. Check the box to show Library folder.

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8

That’s a good tip. I normally use command + shift + period and leave the Library folder visible by dragging it to the sidebar. When working on other people’s computer I would toggle it on and off as needed.

That still works except, at some point, it stopped displaying the Mobile Documents folder. At least on my Macbook Air.

Library logged in as an admin:
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Library in Terminal - logged in as root
1

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I found out about that recently while setting up a new MBA and have found it handy to have the Library always visible.