Download All iCloud Drive Files to Your Mac

Little cloud icons next to half your files mean those files currently exist only in iCloud — your Mac holds placeholders. That's fine until you're offline, migrating away from iCloud, or making a real backup. Here's how to pull full local copies of everything down at once, and how to verify nothing got left behind.

First: make sure they'll fit

Downloading everything means your disk needs room for your entire iCloud Drive. Check both numbers before starting:

1. Open System Settings → your name → iCloud, and note the iCloud Drive figure in the storage breakdown (click Manage for detail).
2. Open System Settings → General → Storage and check your free space. You want comfortable headroom — macOS behaves badly when a disk passes roughly 90% full.

If it won't fit, download selectively (per-folder, below) or clear disk space first.

Method 1: Download Now in Finder

1. Click iCloud Drive in Finder's sidebar.
2. Select everything with ⌘A.
3. Right-click the selection and choose Download Now.

Finder queues the lot, folders included, and progress pies appear next to items as they come down. Turn on the status bar (View → Show Status Bar) to watch free space fall as local copies land — a crude but honest progress meter. This is the right method when you want specific folders local — run it on just those folders instead of select-all. The catch: it's a one-time action, not a policy. macOS remains free to evict those files again later when disk space gets tight, as long as Optimize Mac Storage is on.

Method 2: turn off Optimize Mac Storage

To make "everything local" the permanent rule rather than a one-off:

1. Open System Settings → your name → iCloud.
2. Scroll to the bottom and turn off Optimize Mac Storage.

macOS starts downloading every online-only file in iCloud Drive and stops evicting anything from now on. The initial download can take hours for a large Drive — leave the Mac awake and plugged in. To undo, flip the toggle back on; nothing is lost, macOS just regains permission to evict when space runs low.

For a big overnight download, stop the Mac from idling to sleep without touching any settings — caffeinate holds it awake only while the command runs:

# keep the Mac awake until you press Ctrl+C (nothing to undo)
caffeinate -i

Verify the download actually finished

Don't trust the absence of cloud icons in one window — check the whole tree. Files that are still online-only exist on disk as hidden .icloud stubs, which makes verification a one-liner:

# count iCloud Drive files that are still online-only
find ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs -name "*.icloud" | wc -l

# see how much space the local copies occupy
du -sh ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs

When the count reaches 0, every file has a full local copy. If it plateaus above zero, run the find without wc to list the stragglers — then right-click those specific files in Finder and choose Download Now. A file that repeatedly refuses usually points at a sync problem rather than a download problem.

One more caveat for backup-makers: do this before running Time Machine or a clone. Backups only capture what's physically on disk, so any file still showing a cloud icon is absent from the backup you think is complete.

Going the other direction

If you're doing this to leave iCloud Drive entirely, download first, verify with the commands above, then move files out — the safe order matters. And if you only wanted some files local, the reverse trick frees disk instead: Remove Download makes files online-only on demand.