Mobile Documents Folder

[Cursor]

Good evening all,

I have a 50gb iCloud account, of which I use about 30gb for documents, photos, etc. I've noticed my rMBP hard drive slowly dwindling and in trying to delete files came across the "Mobile Documents" folder in my user library folder. This seems like a complete duplicate of my iCloud Drive.

I was always under the impression that files kept on iCloud didn't take up any space on the local drive. Why is that folder 30gb in size?

I keep photos and movies in iCloud, so they don't take up space on my laptop. Can someone clear up what's going on?

Thanks!

 

[Weaselboy]

This seems like a complete duplicate of my iCloud Drive.

That is not really duplicate, it IS the iCloud Drive folder. Finder just labels in iCloud Drive, but you are really looking at the Mobile Documents folder there. Any files stored in iCloud Documents online are mirrored in that local folder.

 

[Cursor]

That is not really duplicate, it IS the iCloud Drive folder. Finder just labels in iCloud Drive, but you are really looking at the Mobile Documents folder there. Any files stored in iCloud Documents online are mirrored in that local folder.

So if I'm understanding correctly, every Mac that is connected to my iCloud account will have an additional 30gb folder taking up space on the hard drive? Why doesn't iCloud Drive take up any space on iDevices?

 

[Weaselboy]

So if I'm understanding correctly, every Mac that is connected to my iCloud account will have an additional 30gb folder taking up space on the hard drive? Why doesn't iCloud Drive take up any space on iDevices?

iCloud Drive is not the same thing as your iOS iCloud backups. But if you have for example, a couple hundred Pages and Numbers documents in iCloud Drive and they take 5GB of space, every device with iCloud Drive enabled will have that 5GB of files on the device. On both OS X and iOS you can go in the iCloud Drive settings and control that a little by category. You can see the options here in my screenshot.

 

[subaiku]

Sorry to revive this thread but I'm having the same issue with the Mobile Documents. Strange thing is when I click on it, it does open up the iCloud Drive folder but there's nothing in it but two files which are not even more than 100kb.

It gets even stranger. I then made an alias of the Mobile Documents folder on my desktop for easy access and when i click on THAT alias it opens up the Mobile Documents folder which has what looks like App folders.

In here I can see that the Whatsapp folder is the culprit with a backup folder the size of 21Gb. Is this folder safe to delete?

 

[EMJAYWLZ]

Sorry to revive this thread but I'm having the same issue with the Mobile Documents. Strange thing is when I click on it, it does open up the iCloud Drive folder but there's nothing in it but two files which are not even more than 100kb.

It gets even stranger. I then made an alias of the Mobile Documents folder on my desktop for easy access and when i click on THAT alias it opens up the Mobile Documents folder which has what looks like App folders.

In here I can see that the Whatsapp folder is the culprit with a backup folder the size of 21Gb. Is this folder safe to delete?

Hey folks! So, if you don't want headache, don't delete this folder called Mobile Documents or any of it's contents. What happens is you will not be able to see your hand made folders in your iCloud folder in finder.

You will see any of the App folders associated with iCloud, but anything else, it will "appear" lost. But if you look at the media manager bar below you will see that your files are still present noted by the size of the file taken up in your iCloud account.

I was worried that when I deleted this folder, I ended uploading a link to my iCloud file system, but leave it to . It looks like with enough time, the file system rebuilt itself and all was well.

When your fat empty SSD is gasping for space, and you don't know why, the file you will need to find and delete is called iCloud Archive or something to that effect that will usually be found in your documents folder.

While trying to do some file management I downloaded much of my iCloud library to my local disk and foolishly forgot that it would devour my SSD space.

To reclaim to file space, seek out an iCloud Archive folder in documents and that should do the trick and you can rest assured that all of your files in iCloud are safe and sound.

Cheers! ~ MJW