How to manage your iCloud storage on the Apple Mac

Apple provides iCloud online storage space for your Apple Mac, iPhone and iPad. How much are you using? You might be surprised at the amount. Check your iCloud storage and delete the junk.

Even when you think you are not using much iCloud storage, you could be using several gigabytes because macOS, iOS and apps may be using it without your knowledge. Apps you no longer have could be using storage and that is simply a waste of space.

If you are on the free plan you definitely need to keep an eye on iCloud space used, but even if you pay for storage, you don't want to be paying for storage you don't need. If you use it only for essential items and delete anything unused, you might be able to downgrade to a cheaper plan and save money. Let's take a look at managing iCloud on the Mac.

See an iCloud overview

Go to the Apple menu in the top left corner of the screen and select System Preferences. Click the iCloud icon and there is a list of applications on the Mac that use iCloud. If you have only one Mac and no iPhone or iPad, you could manage without iCloud for all those apps. Where they come in useful is for syncing between Macs, iPhones and iPads.

We will come back to the two options at the top right. Let's look at the storage usage bar at the bottom first. Here you can see how much iCloud storage you have and how much is used.

• Are you near your storage limit?
• Do you have too much free space?

If you are on a 2TB iCloud strage plan and are using less than 200GB, you could downgrade and save money. Similarly, if you are on the 200GB plan and are using less than 50GB, you are wasting money. If you are near the storage limit, cleaning up by deleting unnecessary files might mean you don't have to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

Hover the mouse over the colours to see iCloud space usage

See what's using iCloud

Click the Manage button in the bottom right corner and a new list of the apps using Cloud is displayed and you can see the amount of space each one occupies. For example, select Backups and you can see the backups created by the iPhone and iPad. Are there old backups from iOS devices you no longer have? After upgrading the iPhone and iPad a few times, you may be wasting a lot of space on backups. Select any you do not need and click the Delete butotn at the bottom.

Delete data from old software

Scroll down the list of apps on the left and you might find software you once had, but have removed, perhaps because you don’t need it any more, you got bored with it, or it wa sa free trial and you decided not to buy it. The apps may have stored information on iCloud that is still there and occupying valuable storage space.

Here is Agenda, an app I once tried, but now no longer have installed on my Mac. It has 2.1MB of files on iCloud. It isn't a huge amount, but some apps can use a lot more storage space. If you are sure you will never use this app again, click Delete documents & data.

Other unused or deleted apps like this can be selected and deleted, freeing up iCloud storage space. It is important to check what is using iCloud every so often and to clear out anything you don’t need. If you just let it build up forever, you will eventually run out of storage space and it could be simply from junk files left behind from apps you have uninstalled a long time ago.

Documents stored in iCloud

Return to the iCloud in System Preferences and click the Options button next to iCloud. This displays a list of system apps that use iCloud for storage.

It is up to you whether these apps use iCloud and if you only have one Mac, then you might not consider it useful to store files in iCloud. Why not just store them on your Mac? Where this is useful is when you have multiple Apple devices like a Mac, iPhone and iPad and you can access files from anywhere.

That top item, Desktop & Documents Folders can use tens or even hundreds of gigabytes of storage space on iCloud. Do you need to be able to access the Mac's Desktop and Documents folders from elsewhere? If not, disable it and free up a huge amount of space on iCloud. You might need to manually delete the files in Finder to free up the online space though.