Make iCloud Files Online-Only on Mac (Remove Download)

Your disk is filling up, but half of what's on it is old projects you touch twice a year. If those files live in iCloud Drive, you don't have to delete anything: Remove Download evicts the local copy, keeps the file safe in iCloud, and leaves a placeholder you can re-open any time you're online. It's the most underused disk-space tool on the Mac.

How Remove Download works

Every iCloud Drive file can exist in two states on your Mac: a full local copy, or an online-only placeholder — the filename and icon stay visible in Finder with a small cloud-and-arrow badge, but the bytes live only in iCloud. Remove Download flips a file from the first state to the second. Nothing is deleted in any meaningful sense: the file remains complete in iCloud, still syncs to your other devices, and double-clicking the placeholder downloads and opens it. The only cost is that reopening requires an internet connection and a wait proportional to the file's size.

Evict files or whole folders

1. In Finder, navigate anywhere inside iCloud Drive (including Desktop and Documents, if you sync them).
2. Select a file, several files, or an entire folder.
3. Right-click and choose Remove Download.

The cloud badge appears immediately and the disk space is reclaimed within moments. On a folder, eviction applies to everything inside recursively — a 30 GB "2022 projects" folder becomes 30 GB of free disk in one right-click. To undo, right-click the same item and choose Download Now, or simply open the file.

Good candidates for eviction: finished project folders, old video exports, installers, and anything you'd describe as "archive". Bad candidates: anything you might need on a flight, files other apps index or watch, and — critically — anything for which iCloud is your only copy and you also rely on Time Machine, because backups can't capture a file that isn't on disk.

The Terminal version: brctl evict

Apple's iCloud Drive CLI can do the same thing scriptably, which is handy for evicting by pattern or from an automation:

# evict the local copy (file stays in iCloud)
brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Archive/big-export.mov

# undo: bring the full copy back down
brctl download ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Archive/big-export.mov

The path must point inside ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs — that's the real on-disk home of iCloud Drive. brctl evict works on single files; loop it over a folder's contents if you're scripting.

What to expect afterwards

• Spotlight and Finder search still find evicted files by name, since the placeholder carries the metadata.
• Quick Look may need a download — pressing space on a placeholder fetches enough to preview.
• macOS may re-evict on its own. If Optimize Mac Storage is on (System Settings → your name → iCloud, bottom of the pane), the system already does this automatically when disk space runs low; Remove Download just lets you choose the victims yourself, earlier and more sensibly than the automatic pass would.
• Offline means locked out. A placeholder without internet is a name you can look at. Before travel, right-click anything you'll need and choose Download Now.

To see how much you've actually reclaimed, select the evicted folder and press ⌘I for Get Info: the size on disk collapses to almost nothing while the folder's nominal contents stay listed. Finder's status bar (View → Show Status Bar) tracks free space live, so you can watch the number climb as evictions land.

The opposite problem

If you've arrived here with the reverse complaint — too many cloud icons, not enough local files — the fix is the mirror image: download everything in iCloud Drive at once and optionally turn off Optimize Mac Storage so it stays that way.