I compressed files in iCloud, now my phone has 4gb of Files that were never on my device

[merrygoround]

I have put files and such in iCloud Drive but never tried to retrieve them, so I try to and find out you can only download file by file and not even entire folders(wtf). So my work around was to compress the files making it one big file which I could download multiple files on my computer. I didn’t think it would take up space on my device since it’s in the cloud and never been on my device and the compressed file landed in iCloud. However now my files app is 4gb. And there are no files listed on my device. How to make it go back down?? Why would it take space , isn’t the point of iCloud to save space???

 

[TorbenIbsen]

No. The purpose of iCloud is two-fold: 1) To act as a synchronization mechanism so data which are "inside" apps (like Contacts, Notes, Calendar) are distributed between devices automatically. 2) To act as a file sharing mechanism so files can be accessed by all your Apple devices.

You can use "optimized storage" to save space on our Mac. - But some people have more than one Mac and may also have several other devices which may have room for more storage than the one where you are using the "Optimized Storage" feature.

So iCloud is not a kind of dumb, external harddisk or a passive cloud storage solution.

 

[merrygoround]

No. The purpose of iCloud is two-fold: 1) To act as a synchronization mechanism so data which are "inside" apps (like Contacts, Notes, Calendar) are distributed between devices automatically. 2) To act as a file sharing mechanism so files can be accessed by all your Apple devices.

You can use "optimized storage" to save space on our Mac. - But some people have more than one Mac and may also have several other devices which may have room for more storage than the one where you are using the "Optimized Storage" feature.

So iCloud is not a kind of dumb, external harddisk or a passive cloud storage solution.

They why doesn’t the space show up on my iPad where the files originated at?

I’m still confused on how compressing files in the cloud would put the files on my phone, when I put those files in iCloud originally(manually, I wasn’t using a backup) , they never took up space on the device

 

[Sundah]

It's normal for files stored on iCloud to take up space on your iPhone. iCloud is not an "online-only storage service" in the sense that you upload files to it and they're kept strictly in the cloud.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Moral of the story: Don’t try to “Trick” iCloud Drive into behaving some way it’s not meant to. It either suits your purposes, or it doesn’t.

 

[merrygoround]

Moral of the story: Don’t try to “Trick” iCloud Drive into behaving some way it’s not meant to. It either suits your purposes, or it doesn’t.

I was not trying to “trick” iCloud Drive into doing anything. If they didn’t want you to compress files, the option wouldn’t exist on the damn app. And what I did was minor and my right as well as everyone rights.There are people with up to 2TB of files in iCloud that they can’t figure out how to retrieve What if you lose your devices in a robbery or disaster ? Is it not your right to be able to retrieve your files that you pay to store?
Ridiculous

 

[merrygoround]

It's normal for files stored on iCloud to take up space on your iPhone. iCloud is not an "online-only storage service" in the sense that you upload files to it and they're kept strictly in the cloud.

When I uploaded the original files it did take space but it wasn’t consider files it was considered iCloud Drive but then disappeared within a day or two but it’s been weeks for this. perhaps if I delete the compress files out of the cloud, the space will disappear off of my phone . I hope

 

[pbhorjee]

Ok - I think I can help clarify. So you got your data up to iCloud and it lived there happily for some time. You would access some parts of it on different machines and view or edit it. When you did that a copy of the iCloud document you edited would be downloaded to your machine that was accessing it and when you hit save it would copy back up to iCloud. Eventually that local copy would go away and then there would only be the iCloud version of that document and all the rest. This was usually just a relatively small file and you wouldn't even notice the hit to your disk. Your apps that you manipulated the docs with live on your mac or iPhone or whatever so it makes sense that you'd download, do work, then it would upload to iCloud and sync to any machines that wanted to keep a local copy on their local drives and those that diid not would just view those iCloud docs from afar in Finder until the files were viewed or edited just like on the other machine, then they would have to be downloaded. Makes sense. If you work on something, it has to be local (or at least local to the app that does the work). When you save it goes back up, then drops from your local machine after some timne. This is all handled by the OS pretty seamlessly so you don't even think about it.

So what is compression? Its an little app with a singular purpose and is kinda invisible to most people and is integrated into and lives behind buttons in the finder, which leads us to think its not an app doing work on files, that it Just Happens. That it actually lives locally on your mac or iPhone and works (really hard) on all the files you give it to work on as a batch, compressing and kinda stitching together for the sake of the single compressed and boxed up .zip or .tar. But it usually needs all the work you give it all at once and then it goes in on that batch. Compression is an app that needs all those files at once to compress them and put a bow on the one file that comes out the other end. Compression is not magic that happens on a disk drive in the iCloud data center., There are no apps that sit on servers doing work up there. (There are web versions of the Apple apps and a few other stuffs that do sit in some data center somewhere, but not anywhere near high capacity, highly optimized storage nodes and racks in the iCloud datacenter. Just like when you download a doc to work on it locally, that doc goes to another data center and sits on a web server while you work on it, then goers back tio iCloud. There's even 3rd party compression apps that you can buy or rent on like the web version of One Drive, but thats the same connect.

So essentially what you did was ask your local compression app on your local machine to compress everything up there on iCloud, but it needed to download all of it to compress it, then upload the compressed file back up to iCloud so it would seem like it magically happened there (Apple loves to make things look like magic, but ends up confusing the hell out of people where theres even the slightest unique usage or if there's a hiccup or error of any kind because they don't lay the working of stuff more bare so its obvious whats going on with your files, so people get frustrated).

Anyway, hope that helps. Those file copys the compression app worked on, if they aren't visible in your finder, then do a search for a known file name in that bunch and see if you can locate where that cache is. Its too bad that app wasn't smart enough to actively delete that cache of stuff because of the number and size of them and what that would do to your machine's performance. Maybe empty the trash?

This guy is a genius and he writes little blog posts about how apple stuff, macs especially, really work: https://eclecticlight.co/?s=iCloud

And he writes little utils to help Mac users get by: https://eclecticlight.co/downloads/

Check these out. These are for iCloud specifically: https://eclecticlight.co/cirrus-bailiff/

Anyway, good luck.